The protest: 900 signatures against a machine fed by the museum’s own collection

Beeple’s kinetic AI sculpture Diffuse Control opened September 19 at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art — his first major exhibition in his home state of Wisconsin. The artist was born in North Fond du Lac and went on to sell Everydays: The First 5000 Days at Christie’s for $69.3 million in 2021. Within a week of the Madison opening, the story stopped being about the machine and became about a fight over consent.

The numbers

A Madison painter and MMoCA member, Noah Peterson, organized an open letter in early September. The arc, countable at each step: roughly 100 signatures over one weekend, 700 by the following Tuesday, past 900 by opening day. Signers called the show tone-deaf, embarrassing, and disrespectful to the artists; the word “cannibalization” recurred throughout. Peterson’s demands escalated from “a version using only living artists with direct consent” to “heavily modify or cancel the show” — though as of the Cap Times’ reporting, he had still not sent the letter to the museum.

What the sculpture does

Diffuse Control is 12 synchronized video screens set in polished aluminum, fed by 18 works from MMoCA’s permanent collection, selected by director Paul Baker Prindle. The contemporary set holds Wisconsin and Chicago-adjacent painters: Gertrude Abercrombie (died 1977), John Wilde (died 2006), Barbara Rossi (died 2023), plus Gibson Byrd, John Schacht, and Nancy Mladenoff. Two historical sets add a Goya etching from Los Caprichos and Japanese woodblocks by Hiroshige, Kuniyoshi, and Kunisada. Visitors drive the imagery from their phones and can buy prints of what they make.

The piece premiered at The Shed in New York (summer 2025, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Deja Belardo), ran at LACMA from October 2025 to January 2026 with five curatorial-fellow iterations, and moves to the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State after Madison.

Peterson’s objection: “To me, it’s the fact that these artists died and can’t vouch for how their work is used. I wanted to put that in a clear way to MMoCA.”

Director Paul Baker Prindle’s answer, to Wisconsin Public Radio: “That’s kind of true, and also not.” The museum contacted every identifiable copyright holder — estate trustees and the one living artist. “Where consent was required by the law, we received it.” Some works are public domain; some the museum owns outright. He called the letter “almost everything wrong” and the protest itself “a healthy part of what we do.”

So the legal structure answers the consent question with estate paperwork, and the letter answers it with the artists’ absence. The show runs through January 10, 2027.

Details worth knowing

The sculpture has a glitch mode: when several visitors compete for control at once, the piece stops responding as intended — a sculpture about contested decision-making that jams when the contest gets real.

Baker Prindle places Beeple in a lineage — Vera Molnár’s algorithmic drawings in the 1960s, Harold Cohen’s AARON, Stelarc fusing body and machine — and calls himself a “tech luddite.” On institutional AI policy, his position: blanket restrictions on artists are “incredibly dangerous.” The museum posted an FAQ addressing the environmental and ethical objections.

Sources

  • Cap Times: “Madison museum plans AI-generated sculpture, to artists’ dismay” (Lindsay Christians)
  • Wisconsin Public Radio: “Madison art museum debuts new exhibition using generative AI amidst pushback” (Trevor Hook, Wisconsin Today)
  • Isthmus event listing