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’...

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 eve...

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...

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 misun...

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 t...

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...

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...

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 ext...

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...

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...

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 Li...

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 art...

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...

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 yo...

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 bro...

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 organiz...

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 parall...

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. ​H...

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...

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 Bo...

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 v...

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...

​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 t...

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 i...