Artwrld

If you’re an art critic, it helps to feel that something is at stake in what you’re writing about. It sharpens the pencil, so to speak.When reading the criticism of Ben Davis, the feeling of stakes is ever-present—the sense that art and its aims, concerns, and debates are not frivolous but core, nested within the broader sweep of human affairs like a thinking heart.This is why for a long time I’ve considered Ben to be the best, most consistently interesting art critic anywhere. I’ve also been lucky enough to have worked with him for almost a decade across tours of duty at Artinfo and Artnet, and I’m proud to call him a friend.So what’s at stake in art today? A lot. The world is in transition, with our old political, cultural, and media institutions in crisis and AI speed-running us into an uncertain and encompassing new paradigm. Things are palpably in a state of reorganization. Lots of cheese is being moved. Ben argues that, amid all of this flux, art itself is under threat.Today, for the conclusion of season two of these Artwrld conversations, and for my final episode here at Artwrld before moving on to new projects, I’m very happy to talk to Ben about the state of the art today.

Around 2015, after finishing the acclaimed movie Foxcatcher, the filmmaker Bennett Miller began working on a documentary about AI. Though it was years before Chat GPT brought the technology to mainstream attention, he managed to capture a bracing, far-sighted vision of how AI could change society and culture through interviews with tech founders, venture capitalists, scientists, artists, and everyone in between, from Sam Altman to Tom Stoppard. After filming was done, Bennett received early access to DALL-E, OpenAI’s image generator. Fast-forward to today. The documentary, a six-part series called A Better World, has become frozen in a hazy legal purgatory and is yet to be released. But Bennett is a man transformed. Today he is a virtuosic AI artist whose spectral, sepia-toned images—surreal technological echoes of 19th-century ghost photography—have been displayed around the world by Gagosian Gallery, most recently in a Paris show that ended earlier this month.So, what has he learned on his voyage into the strange heart of AI? And how has it shaped his thinking about how art functions today?

If you're in the art and tech space—or the art world writ large—you've probably been at least a little transfixed by the drama, controversy, and, ultimately, financial success attached to the Christie's Augmented Art auction that ended last week.Some decried the sale, the first ever dedicated to art made with artificial intelligence, as glorifying what they see as mass exploitation of creative work by the big AI companies. In fact, after it was announced, approximately 6,500 people signed an open letter to Christie’s with a simple cri de coeur: “We ask that, if you have any respect for human artists, you cancel the auction.”Others have argued that the artists featured in the sale are doing exactly what we want artists to do: to experiment with new tools and ideas, break conventional boundaries, and push through to uncharted terrain. Heightening the stakes, perhaps? The auction's success, with its $730,000 haul coming in 20 percent above estimate, was a rare bright spot in an otherwise gloomy and perturbed art market. So let's talk about it! And let's hear the backstory from the person who organized it, Christie's Vice President of Digital Art Nicole Sales Giles. Because the work that went into the sale, both by the artists and the auction house, is actually more consequential—and more fascinating—than meets the eye.This week, I am very pleased to talk to Nicole about how she went about assembling Augmented Art, what AI art even means, and what the artists who protested the auction got absolutely right.

Few things feel worse than being misunderstood. That’s especially the case when you’re persistently misunderstood—when, try as you might to convince someone of something you know to be true, it falls on deaf ears because their mind is already made up to the contrary.Now, imagine if the future of your reality was being constructed atop this misunderstanding, and if it wasn’t just you who was misunderstood but a vast population of other people like you.Years ago, the artist and professor Stephanie Dinkins realized this nightmare scenario was in fact playing out with AI, with foundation models being trained on data that replicates the same pernicious biases across race, gender, and other points of difference that contribute to making our society unequal and problematic.So, she resolved to do something about it.

A few years ago, the Kickstarter-cofounder and creative entrepreneur Yancey Strickler went down the crypto rabbit hole. In his brilliant 2019 essay “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” he had articulated his realization that the social web had become a hunting ground for extractive tech companies that preyed on your time, attention, privacy, agency, and money. If artists wanted to escape their clutches and build sustainable careers on their own terms, they needed to hide out in private forums—and the NFT space, with its tight-knit community and promise of decentralization, seemed to offer a safe haven in the scary thicket.So when he founded Metalabel in 2021 as a new kind of platform for creatives based on communal making, automated revenue splits, and friction-free social distribution, it seemed natural to build it on a crypto foundation. But soon a new realization dawned: there were dangers in the rabbit hole as well, with speculation and a drive toward profit maximization creating a casino environment that many artists found inhospitable.So, after going down the rabbit hole, Yancey went through the rabbit hole, and out the other side.

Back in 2014, after Google Glass was released, the tech journalist and entrepreneur Tom Emrich wore that notoriously before-its-time AR device for nearly a year, trying to find ways to integrate it into his life. One day, a man who saw him sporting the wearable at a Tim Hortons in Toronto called him "the man from the future." Now, after a decade-long run in the mixed-reality field that involved selling a startup to Niantic and then leading AR product management there, Tom remains a man from the future—only that future, in which spatial computing transforms the way we experience the world around us, is now much, much closer. What that strange new paradigm will look like is the subject of Tom's new book, titled The Next Dimension: How to Use Augmented Reality for Business Growth in the Era of Spatial Computing. In it, he talks about where the technology is today, where it's going, and how to prepare for it.So how will spatial computing open new doors for artistic creation, for the art market, and for the art experience writ large? And, more to the point, how can the famously slow-moving art ecosystem position itself so it is ready for the arrival of sophisticated, mass-adopted wearables within the next half decade?

With AI, blockchain, and augmented reality gradually but inexorably changing the nature of creative work, there has probably never been a time when planning one’s artistic career path has been more fraught with uncertainty. In a tough art market, old strategies are starting to look shopworn. Novel approaches are emerging, from reimagining the studio as a startup, as Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst have done with Spawning, to taking on venture capital as an alternative to working with galleries, as some top crypto artists are trying out.Confronted with this garden of forking paths, what should an ambitious, tech-leveraging artist do if they want to be successful?Enter Salome Asega. As the head of NEW INC, the New Museum of Contemporary Art's art x tech incubator, Salome is dedicated to helping the next generation of creatives shape their concepts and career strategies in this very strange moment. And, at a time when certain Silicon Valley incubators have taken a rightward turn, NEW INC tackles its work with a decidedly New York City ethos, leveraging strategies of diversity, equity, and inclusion not only as humanistic touchstones but also competitive advantages in the cutthroat marketplace of culture and ideas. If you want to see what the result of NEW INC’s approach looks like, consider that both Stephanie Dinkins and her Bina48 robot and the attention-hacking collective MSCHF were supercharged by the incubator.So, what kind of future art world is Salome building toward at NEW INC, and why is New York City the natural place for it to take root?In this episode, I sit down to talk to Salome about her fascinating, vital work.

It’s a twist of history that the AI revolution first reached mainstream attention via visual art, with DALL-E, and yet artists have been among the technology’s biggest critics. Ownership of intellectual property, fair compensation for work being used in training datasets, fear of having art’s essential quality polluted, and an unwillingness to be glorified product testers for what are seen as extractive Big Tech companies are just some of the concerns the art world has voiced. So, the question is, can AI be both humane and a transformatively powerful tool for artistic creation?That is the riddle that lies at the heart of Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s work, both as acclaimed artists and as entrepreneurs behind Spawning, an AI company that is striving to create a “clean” open-source image generation model trained only on materials from the public domain.Now, with Spawning readying the release of Public Diffusion, its most powerful image-generation tool yet, they are hoping to change the way the art world at large looks at the technology—and, beyond that, how we as a society think about the tradeoffs required to make it work.In this episode, I am very pleased to talk to Holly and Mat about how they believe AI stands to impact art, and how they aspire to shape the art ecosystem to come.This episode is supported by Digital Original.About Digital OriginalDigital Original is an art tech software solution designed exclusively for galleries. It enables them to create blockchain-secured digital counterparts of physical artworks equal in value and price to the original. With Digital Original, galleries can confidently enter the digital market, offering collectors an exclusive right to own digital art in a secure, speculator-proof format.

Christopher Lyons is a visionary leader, entrepreneur, and President of Web3 Media at a16z crypto. Lyons joined a16z in 2013, first as chief of staff to co-founder Ben Horowitz. In 2021, he helped launch a16z’s first $400M Seed Fund. Prior to that, he founded the firm’s Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF). Launched in 2018, CLF became a beacon of change, connecting the world’s greatest cultural leaders (athletes, entertainers, musicians, and executives) with cutting-edge technology companies. More importantly, it became a platform to uplift Black builders and creators, fostering their journey toward excellence in the tech industry. Under Lyons’ leadership, the CLF Fund became Silicon Valley’s inaugural venture capital fund comprised entirely of Black Limited Partners, setting a powerful precedent for inclusivity in the sector.​Lyons’ career began in the music industry, honing his skills as a sound engineer under the mentorship of Grammy-Award-winning producer Jermaine Dupri. His entrepreneurial spirit led him to launch PictureMenu, a pioneering mobile app and digital menu platform. He sits on the boards of Yuga Labs, The James Beard Foundation, The Black Economic Alliance, and New Story Charity. Additionally, Lyons is the proud founder of Lyons Wine, an Italian wine brand that reflects his passion for craftsmanship.In recognition of his exceptional leadership and contributions to the tech industry, Lyons became a Kauffman Fellow graduate (Class ‘19). He is also a proud member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Incorporated (KT Spring ‘07), where he continues to foster a sense of community and mentorship.This episode is supported by Digital Original.About Digital OriginalDigital Original is an art tech software solution designed exclusively for galleries. It enables them to create blockchain-secured digital counterparts of physical artworks equal in value and price to the original. With Digital Original, galleries can confidently enter the digital market, offering collectors an exclusive right to own digital art in a secure, speculator-proof format.

As a disruptive new administration arrives in Washington with pledges to hit the fast-forward button on Mars, AI, and crypto while simultaneously rolling back the clock on progressivism, it can be hard to orient oneself in the present historical moment. The scope of the changes underway in our society seem both overwhelming and nebulous; the precise contours of these changes are slippery to grasp as well.Fortunately, there’s a shortcut to catching up on the nature of American life in 2025: you can just look at Beeple. And I mean really, truly look at Beeple, both the artist and his work, and do so with refreshed eyes.Because the paradox of the artist born Mike Winkelmann is that he is both incredibly famous—as the avatar of the pandemic crypto craze whose $69.3 million auction at Christie’s served as the opening bell for the NFT bull market—and at the same time vastly under-appreciated when it comes to his real art-historical and cultural significance. So what are the real insights of Beeple’s art, how does he think the art world needs to evolve to catch up with contemporary audiences, and how is he trying to drive this transformation from his futuristic 50,000-square-foot headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina?This episode is supported by Digital Original.About Digital OriginalDigital Original is an art tech software solution designed exclusively for galleries. It enables them to create blockchain-secured digital counterparts of physical artworks equal in value and price to the original. With Digital Original, galleries can confidently enter the digital market, offering collectors an exclusive right to own digital art in a secure, speculator-proof format.

Monika Bielskyte is a visionary futurist and speculative designer whose work transcends traditional boundaries of art, technology, and social theory. As the founder of Protopia Futures, she challenges conventional dystopian and utopian narratives, offering a framework for imagining inclusive, dynamic futures that embrace plurality and regenerative action.​Born in the Soviet Union and raised in Lithuania, Bielskyte's nomadic explorations across over 100 countries have informed her unique perspective on global interconnectedness. Her multidisciplinary background, spanning from creative direction to cutting-edge technological innovation, allows her to bridge the gap between imagination and real-world application.​Bielskyte's Protopian vision, rooted in the celebration of diversity and life-centric design, has resonated with leading institutions from Hollywood—where she worked as a futurist consultant for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever—to Silicon Valley.​Her speaking and advisory work has encompassed projects for the BBC, DreamWorks, Google, Huawei, IDEO, L’Oréal, McKinsey, Mexico City, Meta, Microsoft, MTN, Nike, SKY, TATA, Technicolor, Telefonica, UAE, UNESCO, Universal, Warner Media, and WEF. Monika has also given lectures at academic and scientific institutions including CERN, Rockefeller University, the Royal Society, and the Royal College of Art.​By advocating for futures literacy and challenging established power structures, Bielskyte invites us to reconsider our relationship with technology, nature, and each other. Her approach offers a timely perspective on shaping a more equitable and sustainable world.

What if the next time you went to a museum you didn’t just look at the art on the wall—what if you activated a controller and played it? To a certain degree, this is already happening. Video game-based art has been displayed in major shows, from the Venice to the Whitney biennial; MoMA has historical video games from Pong to Minecraft in its permanent collection; and the pioneering video game artist Auriea Harvey recently had a survey at the Museum of the Moving Image that had almost as many controllers as wall labels.But Hans Ulrich Obrist, the eminent curator and artistic director of London's Serpentine Galleries, has a vision for the future of art where video games play a far more prominent role—and where, in fact, they are primed to have a transformative impact on the broader art ecosystem.Hans Ulrich declared 2025 to be the “Year of Video Games” at the Serpentine, how his institution has been pioneering the fusion of art and technology for over a decade, and what the future of the museum experience might look like.

How does one describe the Zelig-like art world force of nature that is Kenny Schachter?He’s a teacher, lecturer, and writer whose Artnet column—a monthly compendium of art market gossip, intrigue, and provocation that might be the most truthful thing in the whole art world—I had the unique pleasure of editing for years.He’s a collector who buys far too much work by emerging artists and holds an annual “Hoarder” auction at Sotheby’s to sell off his excess treasures. And, most essentially, he’s an artist. In particular, he’s a digital artist, who for decades has been leveraging technological tools to realize his restless visions, harnessing first video, then social media, then NFTs, and now robotics and AI in ways that push the art conversation into new terrain. For Schachter, art is a way of life, an exhaust system, and method for processing the rapidly changing world we inhabit. This week, for our 12th live Artwrld conversation—the conclusion of season one—we are pleased to talk to Kenny Schachter about why the art establishment is so slow to evolve, and how NFTs, for all their scamminess and manifold annoyances, point the way to a better art world.

One of the reasons the intersection of art and technology is such an exciting space to be is its sheer vivifying complexity, with each side of the dyad containing long histories of innovation that can take a lifetime to appreciate on their own, but when married together flower into something close to magic. If you really want to get complicated, however, there's a third force involved that you can’t ignore if you hope to get the full picture, and that’s capitalism.The artist, technologist, and venture capitalist Sarah Meyohas has been doing remarkable things at the center of this trinity for over a decade. A graduate of both Wharton Business School and Yale’s vaunted MFA program, she first made headlines in 2015 when she forked bitcoin to create Bitchcoin, a token (now we’d call it a memecoin) backed by the value of her art. In 2016, she took over 303 Gallery to trade stocks in order to move markets, using an oil stick to chart the changes in the companies’ performance on canvas: paintings. A few months later, she took over a former Bell Labs facility to photograph 10,000 rose petals and use them to train an algorithm that could infinitely create new versions. So, Meyohas has always been dramatically early to harness her art to revolutionary tech. And for years, she has been capitalizing on her vision, literally—working as a venture capitalist to fund deep-tech startups that align with her moral and aesthetic values.How do all of these things braid together? And what frontiers is she exploring today in both her artwork and VC work?

One of the challenges of spotting an original artist is that we tend to judge new art based on the criteria of the past—causing a major blind spot when it comes to disruptive innovation that’s playing different games with different rules.Today, when so many artists are incorporating emergent technology into their work, this might be more challenging than ever. And it’s probably the reason the broader art world has been slow to appreciate the brilliance of Sam Spratt, who has somehow managed to fuse Old Master painting, crypto, video games, and a dash of Zuckerbergian social-networking into something pretty groundbreaking.A former commercial artist who parlayed an early job doing $20-a-pop illustrations for Gizmodo into a thriving career working on everything from album covers for Donald Glover and Ty Dolla Sign to concepts for Red Dead Redemption 2, Spratt only pivoted to fine art in 2021 with the release of his NFT series “LUCI.” It’s safe to say he nailed the debut. Sold through Nifty Gateway and Christie’s, his work has already generated about $6 million in primary- and secondary-market sales, including the sale of his 1:1 magnum opus The Monument Game to Ryan Zurrer’s 1OF1 Collection for $700,000.But what’s really interesting about Spratt’s work is the way he hitches his intricate digital paintings to crypto’s inherent capacity for gamification in order to build a richly intimate storytelling world of personal significance and human connection. And, yes, it’s about monkeys.This week, for our 10th live Artwrld conversation, we're pleased to talk to Sam Spratt about the ambitious ideas behind his “LUCI” series, where he’s taking it next, and how he’s harnessing the “devil’s casino” of the NFT marketplace to help lost people find their tribe.

Matthieu Lorrain is a creative and technology pioneer in the fields of digital experiences & content innovation.​He is currently Creative Lead, AI & Creativity Research at Google DeepMind. He is also the co-founder of fAke Artists, a creative collective exploring the future of post-reality experiences.​Matthieu Lorrain has a long history working with recognized artists and global organizations to reimagine interactive storytelling. He has been exploring creative applications of emerging technologies for the last 20 years: ranging from interactive video to connected objects, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence. His most recent work focuses on how generative AI can supercharge the creative experience. His past projects have received multiple accolades from global organizations including Emmy Awards, Cannes Lions (Gold), Clios (Gold), Webby’s, Tribeca Film Festival, ‘#1 Product Hunt of the Day’ and FWA.​Matthieu is a guest lecturer at Columbia University, where he delivered the inaugural masterclass on AI & Filmmaking in 2024. He is also frequently invited as featured speaker at major conferences. He has previously spoken at Cannes Lions (3x), SXSW, Spike Asia, 4A's Createtech and the NYC Tech Forum.​Born & raised in the French Alps, Matthieu has lived in Rio de Janeiro, Montreal and Paris before moving to New York City in 2011. He holds a Master’s degree in Cultural Studies from Institut d’Etudes Politiques and another in Marketing & Communication from ESCP Paris Business School.

Since AI broke into public consciousness with ChatGPT's launch in November 2022—just two years ago—the race for artificial general intelligence, or AGI, has dominated headlines as a climactic drama with humanity's fate in the balance. Will creating a digital god redeem us, or will it destroy us? Is it even possible? ​Now, go down a few rungs on the ladder of existentiality, and a parallel race is underway in the art world that’s freighted with its own sublime promise and high-stakes quandaries. I’m talking about the effort to create great AI art—or GAIA, if an acronym is useful—and there is likely no more visible, accomplished, or powerfully backed paladin of this quest than the artist Refik Anadol.​Having spent years perfecting an approach to alchemizing large datasets into jaw-dropping generative artworks, Anadol is a rare figure who can move with equal ease through the art and tech sectors’ corridors of power, in part because his work can offer the impression of looking upon the face of AI itself. He’s even become a spokesperson of sorts, recently seen at Meta Connect trying on a prototype of their Orion AR glasses and declaring, “This can be a whole new world.”​And he’s putting his fingerprint on the museum landscape, too. When his masterwork Unsupervised went on view in MoMA in 2022, its massive popular success helped spark an internal pivot at the institution toward digital art. Last month, he announced that Refik Anadol Studio will be unveiling a museum of its own next year. Called DATALAND and sited in a new Frank Gehry building in downtown LA, it promises to be the world’s first “museum powered by generative AI and ethical tech.” 

Ryan Zurrer is the founder of Dialectic, a Swiss-based fund focused on alternative assets.​Ryan was a very early investor in some of the best-performing venture investments of the last decade. Ryan launched Polychain Capital’s private investment arm and has built a reputation for being a value-add venture investor with a uniquely global purview and deep understanding of decentralized networks.​He founded 1OF1, an important digital art collection which includes Beeple’s HUMAN ONE and Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations – MoMA.

These days, as artificial intelligence begins to spread through society, it’s impossible not to sense that something fundamental about our reality is changing—something as encompassing, in its way, as the shift from summer to autumn. If you ask the futurist, author, and tech executive Cathy Hackl what's happening, she’ll tell you we are entering what she calls a “season of possibility.”​That’s the delicate way to put it. In her exhilarating new book Spatial Computing, co-authored with Irene Cronin, Hackl is more blunt: the combination of AI and spatial computing, she writes, will bring about “unparalleled” change to our world, “surpassing even transformative events in history, such as the advent of electricity or the impact of the Industrial Revolution.”​And it’s happening faster than we may think, with developments like Meta’s newly unveiled Orion glasses suggesting that long-term investments in the technology are starting to pay off in a big way—and that we should begin to prepare for the season to come.​So what does this mean for the art world as we know it—for the artists making art, the galleries selling it, the museums showcasing it, and the rest of us being inspired by it? Hackl believes that, far from killing creativity or bringing about a dystopia, this transition will bring about a new Renaissance.​This week, for our sixth live Artwrld conversation, we are pleased to sit down with Cathy Hackl to discuss her optimistic vision for the future of art.

The artist Anicka Yi is a human being, but she's not stuck up about it. In fact, she's perhaps most at home collaborating with non-human entities, pushing the boundaries of what art can be and who—or what—can create it.First, she began working with microbes, famously deploying bacteria to help her make colorfully blooming "paintings" in giant petri dishes. For her 2017 Hugo Boss Prize show at the Guggenheim, she enlisted colonies of ants to activate her works. More recently, the artist has found a collaborator in AI. In 2021, for her Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, she used the technology to create an ecosystem of floating robotic “aerobes,” blurring the lines between the organic and the synthetic.Now, with her new “Emptiness Project,” Yi is taking her experimentation with artificial intelligence a big step further, training it on her years of art-making materials in the hopes of creating an autonomous digital twin that can outlive her—allowing her creative DNA to continue working, and evolving, in a post-human landscape.So, how should we envision the future of art in world of non-human makers? And how can artists and scientists join forces to create a more flourishing reality? This week, for our fifth live Artwrld conversation, we are pleased to sit down with Anicka Yi to delve into the strange, speculative art world to come.

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.