# Context Creator: The Zero 10 Edition

Source: https://outlandart.substack.com/p/context-creator-the-zero-10-edition?triedRedirect=true

## Summary

Zero 10, Art Basel's new section for NFT-based digital art, is a permanent fixture inside the fair rather than a satellite or novelty, yet it does not fully assimilate. Beeple's Regular Animals, in which robotic dogs photographed visitors and dispensed prints, produced 1,024 prints, and 256 of them were also minted as NFTs and given away free. Unlike Digital Art Mile, which in 2024 set up a parallel fair a ten-minute walk from the Messeplatz in Basel, Zero 10 sits within the main fair, and Mat Dryhurst described its mood on X as "two entirely different worlds, no middle ground."

## Article

The Context Creator is a monthly newsletter that gathers recent developments in digital art and highlights connections and affinities with other projects.

Beeple: Regular Animals #76, 2025

The most talked-about works at Art Basel Miami Beach have always been the ones that treat the fair as a medium. They don’t sit nicely in a booth and behave. They stage performances about the fair’s actual content— status, liquidity, spectacle—often by being flamboyantly shoddy or vulgar. MSCHF’s ATM Leaderboard, presented by Perrotin in 2022, publicly displayed visitors’ bank balances. Perrotin is also the gallery that gave us Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019), the notorious duct-taped banana. Back in 2006 the booth of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise showed nothing but a pack of cigarettes, dragged across the floor in a circle by a motor suspended from the ceiling—Urs Fischer’s Nach Jugendstiel kam Roccoko. Art fair history is written by disruptions.

Last week, several of the ten exhibitors in Zero 10, Art Basel’s new section for NFT-based digital art, presented work in this mode, turning the space into a laboratory for art-fair meta-commentary. Tim Schneider, writing in his newsletter The Gray Market, offered close readings of works by Mario Klingemann, Jack Butcher, and Xcopy—alongside his intelligent analysis of Zero 10’s place in the Art Basel universe—to demonstrate how the section as a whole took transaction and speculation as primary subjects. While Valentina DiLiscia’s report for Hyperallergic treated artists’ entanglement with crypto as a scandal (and, oddly, argued that collectors should have been buying croissants instead), Schneider rightly recognized that this was the point: critique and complicity collapsed into the same gesture.

In a footnote, Schneider says he decided not to write about the most discussed work in Zero 10—Beeple’s Regular Animals—because it hardly needed more attention. But as art-fair meta-commentary, it’s worth dwelling on. Beeple’s robotic dogs were fitted with the heads of Picasso, Elon Musk, himself, and other famous figures, acting as physical avatars for the memetic appropriation he practices in his Everydays. Five of the dogs photographed visitors, processed their images through machine-learning models, and excreted prints from their butts. From a run of 1,024 prints, 256 were also minted as NFTs that were given away for free. Some were immediately resold. On X, @Arthemort reported his dismay at seeing adults’ attempts to buy or steal the receipts that Beeple had given to children. Beeple blew up the traditional decorum of the art fair and replaced it with a free-for-all fueled as much by scatological spectacle as by the speculative frenzy around his works.

Zero 10’s arrival also reframed the fair itself. Many commentators, in the press and on X, observed a kind of symbiosis unfolding in real time. NFTs gained a new layer of cultural legitimacy by occupying real estate on the main floor of the world’s most powerful fair. Art Basel, in turn, got a dose of volatility and virality. Some observers argued that this was primarily collector-driven—NFT holders hunger for the kind of status conferred by Art Base—but the presence of artists in the booths, from globally visible figures like Beeple to lesser-known practitioners, complicated that narrative. They were there to explain their work, onboard new audiences, and test new modes of encounter.

There was also a new visual confidence. On X, @saintsonso remarked the polished installations of Zero are “a far cry” from the junk-shop jumble of monitors at an early NFT auction, juxtaposing images of the two to prove his point. Noah Bolanowski resurfaced a Miami Herald clipping from May 2001, noting that Art Basel Miami Beach had planned a presentation of “Web-based art” section for its very first edition (delayed to 2002 after 9/11). In retrospect, Zero 10 looks less like an anomaly than a belated fulfillment.

View of No Me Olvides (2025) by IX Shells, presented by Fellowship and ARTXCODE at Art Basel Miami Beach. Courtesy Art Basel

The question, then, is not whether NFTs belong at art fairs, but how fully they should be absorbed by them. Art Dubai Digital (launched in 2022) sits in a separate building from Art Dubai, granting it autonomy but also, to some, the air of a sideshow. Digital Art Mile in Basel went further, establishing itself in 2024 as a parallel fair a ten-minute walk away from the Messeplatz where Art Basel takes place. That distance arguably enabled seriousness on its own terms. Earlier precedents, like the Tezos lounge at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2021, which offered tokenized segments of a dynamic AI installation by Mario Klingemann as take-home “souvenirs,” now read as prototypes for Zero 10’s more institutional maturity. Zero 10 now signals something new: not a satellite, not a novelty, but a permanent fixture placed firmly inside the fair.

And yet, it does not fully assimilate. The differences are structural. Collecting here might mean taking one token from an edition of hundreds or thousands rather than acquiring a singular object. Distribution can include peer-to-peer exchange as well as dealer-mediated transactions. Beeple’s Regular Animals exploited the attention economy of Art Basel Miami Beach while relocating value production away from the booth and into secondary markets—closer to the spatial and social logic native to NFTs. It was a work not simply about excess, but about leakage. Value escaped its traditional frame.

Mat Dryhurst, writing on X, described the mood inside Zero 10 as radically out of sync with the rest of the fair: “two entirely different worlds, no middle ground, no competition of ideas even… like there is a quiet treaty to occupy entirely different territories.” His perspective suggests not a failure of integration but a productive tension. Rather than being diffused throughout the fair, the energy of digital art was concentrated—local, volatile, and contagious.

Welcome to Jankspace, Babes by Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung is a mind-melting work of media theory that speaks about new phenomena—slop, deepfakes, gig economies, and the speculative tokenization of everything—in their own icky language. It was released on DIS.art in September, and an illuminating recent interview with Felstead and Leung on the New Models podcast is a good occasion to revisit it. [New Models]

In 2016, the collective terra0 published a whitepaper asking if a forest could own itself. Inspired by discussions about autonomous corporations run on the blockchain, they proposed that this technology could be used to steward natural resources. Now terra0 has formed a nonprofit organization to carry out the project they conceived a decade ago. [Autonomous Forest]

Yancey Strickler wrote a manifesto for groupcore—the sort of nimble collaborative work that his decentralized publishing company Metalabel is designed to support. [Metalabel]

Last month Performa, New York’s performance art biennial, presented The Color Scheme by Aria Dean, a multimedia play about two black gay intellectuals debating art and politics in Weimar Berlin. They performed against a digital backdrop of Tiergarten, reconstructed in Unreal Engine. Travis Diehl’s column about Performa in Spike addresses the script’s content but not the play’s form, which folds techniques of early cinema into chromakeyed video art and virtual reality. [Spike]