Artwrld

One of the thorniest conundrums of the art world—and arguably the greatest business opportunity—lies in the mismatch between the art audience and the art business. ​While the marketplace for art, particularly avant-garde contemporary art, used to be a boutique endeavor that was well matched to its niche collector base, the past few decades have seen new art become relevant and exciting to a far vaster public. But no one has really figured out how to evolve the industry beyond its lucrative traditional formula—passionate demand from a small elite + scarcity of the most desirable work = nosebleed prices—to also meaningfully cater to today’s mass addressable art audience. ​Can new technology help solve the puzzle? That’s long been the belief of Pace Gallery CEO Marc Glimcher. For over a decade, Glimcher has been simultaneously steering his gallery’s blue-chip operation—representing top contemporary stars alongside the estates of historic titans like Picasso, Rothko, Agnes Martin, and Calder—while also experimenting with high-tech artists on ways to unlock new audiences. ​In 2014, Pace began working with the Japanese immersive-art collective teamLab, helping pioneer the notion of monetizing contemporary art via ticketing as well as sales. In 2019, he founded Superblue with Laurene Powell Jobs as a way to bring high-concept immersive art to a broader audience. In 2021, he created Pace Verso to sell artist-made NFTs.​It’s the nature of experiments that sometimes they don’t work as hoped. Glimcher has since stepped away from Superblue; Pace Verso is in a state of evolution. But teamLab? Today the collective sells four million tickets a year for $40 a pop, and that’s in addition to their art sales.​So, is it possible to arrive at a theory of a unified art market? How will new technologies like A.I. and blockchain remake the art world? And how do you navigate the perils of being too early versus too late on innovation? This week, for our fourth live Artwrld conversation, we are pleased to sit down with Marc Glimcher to discuss the above and more.

Will the artists of the future be cyborgs? Actually, some artists already are—only instead of having AI implants in their brains and robotic arms by their sides, they run AI copilots on their laptops and give orders to state-of-the-art painting machines in a laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York.​That lab—based in a sleepy village that was once a clandestine meeting place for Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, and other scientists during World War II—is the sci-fi brainchild of Ben Tritt, a classically trained painter who for years taught students how to painstakingly copy the Old Masters until he realized that technology could offer a better way. Oil painting is a 500-year-old technology, he reasoned. It was time for a systems update.Having founded his company under the original name Artmatr Inc. at MIT in 2017, Tritt has since programmed his robots to make persuasive, impasto-rich paintings for artists ranging from Eric Fischl and Chuck Close to NFT stars like Tyler Hobbs, Beeple, and Erick Calderon to AI innovators like Anicka Yi and Alexander Reben. Now he's setting his sights on radically expanding his operation, using it to enable a new generation of digitally empowered artists to realize their virtual creations in the physical world.​What does this mean for painting as we know it? And how can we ensure that technology remains a tool for artists, instead of artists becoming a tool for technology?​This week, for our third Artwrld conversation, we are excited to sit down with Ben Tritt to talk about his vision for Matr Labs, and what he thinks the art world will look like in 2030. (Hint: very different.)

​The pioneering digital artist Auriea Harvey doesn’t really want to talk about the future these days—she’s much more interesting in talking about the past. It makes a lot of sense.​Why? It’s a cliché to say that great art is often ahead of its time, but, when it comes to the history of digital art in particular, it's is almost always true. The thing is, eventually that time comes, and work that previously had seemed marginal or bizarre or maybe not even art suddenly comes into focus as essential, fitting the present moment like a key in a lock.​That is emphatically the case with the uncannily seductive creations of Harvey, whose current survey at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, takes the viewer back in a time warp to the lost paradise of the late 1990s internet. Back then, in the wild, wide-open era of Netscape Navigator, Flash, and HTML, Harvey and her lover and artistic partner Michaël Samyn experimented with ways to merge their bodies across cyberspace, using rawly intimate websites like skinonskinonskin (1999) to show how technology could create an intense new erotics unbounded by time, space, or even privacy. (Visitors to the site could pay to witness the couple’s love affair via steamy, deeply poetic multimedia content.)​When the net got colonized by Facebook and ad-targeting, Harvey fled to the world of video games, where she and Samyn developed haunting, emotionally resonant titles through their company Tale of Tales; in recent years, disillusioned by the game industry, Harvey has returned to sculpture, making phygital 3D works inspired by ancient myth. Here, again, Harvey is more interested in the past than the future: instead of using technology to move forward in time, she employs it to reconnect with the spooky, secret verities of the ancient past—the kind of occult mysteries once encountered in the cultic spaces of her adoptive city of Rome. It’s a potent magic, an antidote, perhaps, for our era of viral influencers and Taylor Swift.​This week, for our second Artwrld conversation, we are pleased to sit down with Auriea Harvey to talk about the utopian promise of early net art, where the web went wrong, and how looking back at the past can help the digital avant-garde approach the opportunities of the technological world to come.About ArtwrldArtwrld hosts live talks every week with leading artists, technologists, art professionals, and entrepreneurs about the opportunities and challenges at the vanguard of creativity.

What if the art market—what if the whole underlying foundation of the art ecosystem—was a buggy string of legacy code? And, what if you could fix it?​That was the deeper proposition that the artist Kevin McCoy offered up a decade ago when he and the technologist Anil Dash invented the NFT, debuting their breakthrough onstage at Rhizome’s 2014 Seven x Seven conference. By using the blockchain to imbue a digital artwork with unique value and verifiable provenance, they essentially applied a hotfix to a flaw in the art market that until then had made it practically impossible for digital artists to monetize their creations. ​Did it work? Maybe all too well.​Quantum, a generative artwork by McCoy that was the first ever registered on the blockchain, resembles a star exploding and imploding: a supernova. For now, that pulsating image has proven prophetic. Three years after the broader NFT phenomenon burst sensationally into the public consciousness in 2021—a crypto annus mirabilis in which digital artworks and collectibles alike seemed to be going money-viral everywhere (including Quantum, which sold at Sotheby's for $1.47 million)—the sector seems to be similarly collapsing in on itself.​Today, many once-high-flying NFT businesses are struggling or defunct, prices have cratered, and just last week tokenized-art platform OpenSea announced that it had received a Wells notice from the SEC—a sign that regulators may continue to view at least some NFT collections as unregistered securities, i.e. illegal in their current state.​So, what happened to the promise of the blockchain for digital art? And are things as dire as the headlines (like "The Overwhelming Majority of NFTs Are ‘Dead,’ Report Says") suggest?​To inaugurate Artwrld’s conversation series, we're pleased to sit down with Kevin and his wife and artistic partner Jennifer McCoy to talk about the evolving nature of value when it comes to digital art, where things may go from here, and the duo'snew show at New York's Ryan Lee Gallery starring an art-making robot.