In the middle of a room full of working people, there’s a large bird cage-like structure made of cameras and cables. Someone is inside of it; a flash goes off. Just next to this structure there’s a dummy similar to the kind used in crash tests. On both sides of the room there are four plots marked out with black tape. Inside each plot, couples wear VR goggles. They walk backward and forward with their arms stretched out, and are being directed by assistants in black. 

This is your first introduction to Jordan Wolfson’s new work, Little Room, at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. This VR work requires two people to have their bodies scanned—though how exactly this scan will be used within virtual space is not made explicit at first. The wall text reveals little, telling viewers that what they will experience will be “morally and emotionally challenging.” With Wolfson, this disclaimer comes as a matter of course.

Wolfson made his name in the 2010s with puppets, violence, and controversy. Female Figure (2014) featured a sexy animatronic witch who danced in front of a mirror, locking eyes with her audience through the glass. Colored Sculpture (2016) was a nasty little boy doll repeatedly hurled at the ground, and Body Sculpture (2023) took the form of a titanium cube with exquisitely articulated arms that appeared to touch itself, even mime, in its own cube-way, cube-suicide. Little Room is an explicit mix of tactics derived from Wolfson’s puppet-centric art and one of his most iconic works, the VR piece Real Violence (2017). 

In that work, the audience member is dropped into an urban setting on a sunny day. The stillness is interrupted by the appearance of two characters, Wolfson and another man, who is kneeling on the ground, holding his hands up in a pose of supplication. Wolfson is holding a bat. He begins to beat this man to death in front of you. Blood splatters. Recalling the controversy that followed this piece at the Whitney Biennial, I approached Little Room with trepidation.

The process of being scanned, while similar in its gestures to going to the doctor or through the security line at an airport, is the first movement into another reality. Like an initiation rite, the piece begins with crossing a number of thresholds. The first threshold is finding a partner. Fortunately, I was quickly paired with another lone viewer, an artist with elfin features. “We’re about to get very intimate,” I told him. I had no idea. 

We were told to get ready to enter a full-body scanner, and that our silhouettes would be very important. Near the queue, there was a simple black vanity with a double-sided mirror, wipes, hair ties, and tape, as well as baskets for personal effects. People wearing long dresses or skirts were encouraged to put on a pair of grey sweatpants. I was instructed that I should tie my hair back by an assistant who was in the middle of taping someone’s flowing culottes tight at the knee. I was then passed off to the next assistant who was in charge of taking the scan. A platform inside the cage calibrated and raised itself slightly, responding to my measurements. Inside the cage, many cameras were pointed at me. I was told to prepare for the flash.

After our respective scans my partner and I sat at a table and made small talk as we watched the room for clues of what we were about to experience. In a square in front of me a man and a woman have begun the experience, their eyes obscured by the heavy VR headset. They had just finished the calibration. The woman suddenly stepped back, startled, and began to laugh, then to cry. An assistant put a pair of headphones over her ears while she wiped a tear with the bottom of her T-shirt. It dawned on me, too late perhaps: she was reacting to herself. Wolfson had made puppets and animators out of each of his audience members by having each couple don each other’s skin.

When Real Violence premiered at the Whitney Biennial, the piece sealed Wolfson’s reputation as an edgelord. Wolfson insisted that this work and others were not political, that his art was just about violence (despite the fact Real Violence did contain one culturally specific element: Hanukkah prayers that figured prominently on its soundtrack). Given the nationwide movements against gender- and race-based violence and a focus on representation and identity politics that defined the 2010s, his refusal to have his work answer to those terms cast him as a provocateur. Yet it was a role Wolfson seemed to play with pleasure. 

Post-pandemic, amid another Trump presidency, it’s difficult to find his edgelord persona quite so sexy or subversive—there’s enough to fear between the rise of the alt-right, ICE, and so much else. The mid-2010s were about debating what violence was—a microaggression, an artwork, a cop wrapping his bicep around a Black man’s throat and choking him to death. By 2020, the terror of fascism and genocide had reached a fever pitch, changing that discourse entirely.

If Wolfson is such an artist of his time, what is he now? I wondered this to myself as a headset was placed on my head. A white void, lined with a grid that seemed to stretch into infinity, began to appear. My partner in this piece was told by an assistant to calibrate the headset by walking and flipping his palms so that my skin can fit itself to his body. There were technical difficulties. The anticipation was difficult to bear. I had always been curious to know what it is to see myself as others do. The opportunity to do so had finally arrived, and I realized I was frightened.

My hands appeared before me with hair on their knuckles. Glancing down at myself, I saw my partner’s clothing: a striped shirt, beige pants, white sneakers. A figure—myself—appeared in my periphery. She was there, her eyes wide fixed in a bloodshot demonic stare, glitching, body folding and unfolding. Without meaning to, I said the word “stop” out loud.

From the hips down I was quite distorted, shorter and wider than I am, with very small feet. I tried to look up my dress, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, even as I wanted to flinch. Then a rectangular mirror appeared in the void. I could see myself wearing my partner’s skin. His face and gaze were all wrong, and I couldn’t get his arms to work, sometimes they disappeared completely. I tried dancing, and his body shuddered.

Male and female voices began chanting a poem with flat affect. My mouth was opening and closing to match its words: “God molested you.” The word “transparency” chimed as I looked down at myself in my partner’s body, seeing empty space ringed by the outline of his pants and sneakers. The mirror flipped, passed through us, and we followed it. There was a phantom feeling of touch as I skimmed my hand over the surface of the mirror, like trying to grab a beam of light. The poem continued: “Look at your hands, I love you. Look at your hands, I hate you.” We circled each other in that timeless void. The VR goggles suddenly began streaming reality. It was over.

After removing the VR headset and the headphones, my partner and I sat down and drank a glass of water. “You have spots,” he said, and I rolled up the sleeve of my sweater, which I had taken off when I was scanned. I looked at my own freckles, a bit dazed. I realized my internal monologue had gone completely silent during the duration of the experience, and in the moments afterward had to readjust to hearing my own thoughts again. My partner’s experience wasn’t as absorbing. The audio in his headset was broken—he hadn’t heard anything. 

It turned out that the body-switching experience made for a good bonding moment. My partner-in-art and I spent the next few hours wandering around the Beyeler talking about the work. The intensity of the experience, like a physical glow, eventually sloughed off, along with any frustrations with technical frictions. What remains are strong images of encounter, as when that twitching, uncanny body of mine appeared, followed by the moment I saw his face on mine, stiff, carved, and distorted. I’ve been left with a new memory.

Little Room could easily be read as an overly self-referential work, remixing the most obvious mediums and thematic aspects of his practice. But what makes this piece an elegant continuation of his body of work is that it is a quiet, compelling response to the criticism he received over the years. In Little Room, he tries to solve a problem: can the artist skirt the moralistic demands of representation?

Wolfson has often used white characters—including versions of his own body—to create supposedly apolitical scenarios in which violence isn’t racialized. But by putting the bodies of audience members into the work, something hyper-specific is achieved. 

VR has often been touted as an “empathy machine,” with the potential to create understanding and care across disparate groups, as anthropologist Lisa Messeri noted in her recent book In the Land of the Unreal. It seems too neat to think that Wolfson has used VR in this way. Rather, with Little Room he seems to give imagined critics exactly what they want—not to think of the artist anymore, of what anything represents, but to experience themselves, that entity we are all obsessed with. As for your role puppeting the Other, good luck with that burden, because it’s not on Wolfson anymore. If there is violence in that room, it’s something you brought with you. Can you handle that?

In late March, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the company’s flagship AI platform, ChatGPT, could produce high-quality images under its new version GPT-4o. Within hours, a Seattle software engineer used the new capabilities to transform a family photo into the style of Studio Ghibli films like Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away. The trend quickly went viral, with Altman and other OpenAI staffers posting Ghiblified images.

As users overloaded OpenAI servers conjuring up these images, the platform gained a million new users within an hour, eventually pushing the platform past 150 million users. By March 27, the White House, the Israel Defense Forces, and India’s civic engagement platform had all jumped on the trend to post Ghiblified propaganda on X. But all users posting Ghibli images—whether they realized it or not—were participating in propaganda.

While the term propaganda tends to conjure images of George Orwell’s 1984 or the graphic posters of Hitler’s Third Reich, propaganda in the 21st century operates differently. As political scientist Dmitry Chernobrov wrote recently, in the age of social media, “the public themselves are co-producing and spreading the message [of elites], meaning that manipulative intent is less evident, and the original source is often obscured.” Similarly, artist Jonas Staal wrote in Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (2019) that propaganda’s basic aim is a “process of shaping a new normative reality that serves the interests of elite power” regardless of whether its deployed in a democracy, a dictatorship, or by a corporation.

It might seem harmless to transform a family photo into the cutesy animated aesthetic of a Hayao Miyazaki film. And yet it reads as more sinister when the White House posts a Ghiblified image of an immigrant without legal status being deported. But, if both images are a kind of messaging to manufacture consent, we have to ask: consent for what exactly?

Since AI image generators were released to the public in 2022, OpenAI and competitors Midjourney and Stability AI have faced pushback. It is widely understood that these models were trained on billions of images scraped from the internet—without creators’ consent or compensation—a fact that has led artists to sue the companies for copyright infringement. Thus far no such lawsuit has been successful. (An OpenAI whistleblower set to testify about IP violations was found dead late last year—his parents are investigating claims it wasn’t a simple suicide.) Aside from court cases, artists have fought a battle for public opinion, urging users and companies to boycott the use of AI.

The fact that the Ghibli images became the symbol of the rollout—as opposed to bizarre “AI slop”—wasn’t mere luck. Altman, as the very public face of his company’s brand, made sure to participate in the trend, changing his profile picture to a Ghiblified portrait and reposting the cute and seemingly legitimate images made with the Ghibli edit. In fact it was the only imagery he used on his social media to promote the update.

Meanwhile, Miyazaki’s work is so well known, and GPT-4o’s mimicry so convincing, that the launch resembled a real brand partnership with one of the world’s most respected animation studios. (That OpenAI managed to rip off a well-known brand and get away with it is an advertisement in itself). While Studio Ghibli still hasn’t commented, considering Miyazaki once called AI art “an insult to life itself,” it’s safe to assume he did not consent to his work being used in this way. 

But it isn’t just Altman and the OpenAI team who are defanging AI technology—it’s every user who participates. Every time a user transforms a selfie, family photo or cat pic into a Ghibli-esque image, they normalize the ability of AI to steal aesthetics, associations, and affinities that artists spend a lifetime building. Participatory propaganda doesn’t require users to understand the philosophical debates about artists’ rights, or legal ones around copyright and consent. Simply by participating they help Altman and his competitors win the battle of public opinion. For many, the Ghibli images will be their first contact with generative AI. For more informed users, the flood of images reinforces the inevitability that AI will re-shape our world. It’s particularly cruel that Miyazaki’s style has become the AI vanguard, given that he famously stuck to laborious hand-drawn animation even as the industry shifted to computer-generated animation.

The leveraging of Ghibli images is not limited to Altman’s AI evangelism. Far more sinister has been the use of Miyazaki’s aesthetic towards ends that directly contradict his long held anti-war and anti-fascist politics.

Growing up in World War II-era Japan and its aftermath, Miyazaki embedded anti-war themes throughout his cinematic oeuvre. When he won an Oscar for Spirited Away in 2003, he refused to attend the ceremony in protest of the Iraq War. Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) and Porco Rosso (1992) depict characters who would rather live on the run than work for imperialist warmongers. Studio Ghibli’s hand-drawn style cannot be separated from the films’ humanist politics. Miyazaki and his team designed a rich and versatile aesthetic housing themes of environmentalism, resistance to war, and an ethic of care. His films are driven by characters who become brave, responsible, and moral in response to shows of love and solidarity. Miyazaki invites us into a world where strength of character is just as wondrous as every epic flight or flash of magic.

Studio Ghibli spent decades developing these humanist associations. But, in a matter of days, political actors hollowed out his aesthetic. On March 27, the official account of the White House posted an image of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez—previously convicted for fentanyl trafficking and lacking legal status—being handcuffed next to an American flag. The image wasn’t a photograph, but a cartoon rendered in the Ghibli aesthetic.

(It’s not the first time Trump’s team used generative AI to make a tasteless and cruel point. In February, Trump posted an AI-generated video showing Gaza under Trump’s control. Ironically, the bizarre video—which showed bearded dancers in bikinis and a giant Trump statue—was originally created as satire, according to the video’s creators.)

Ghibli-fying Basora-Gonzalez was calculated: she was unlikely to draw sympathy compared to, say, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, Lewelyn Dixon, and Camila Muñoz—all since-deported immigrants with legal status and American families. By rendering Basora-Gonzalez into a cartoon, they turn her, and her plight, into a stereotype and a caricature. It’s easier to dismiss a cartoon crying, than a real woman in distress. It also primes regular people to mock the plight of other brown people caught up in Trump’s immigration crackdown. When all the specificity of the photograph is erased, Basora-Gonzalez is made into just one more Latina service worker, inviting audiences to read this stereotyped character as always potentially guilty and deserving of deportation–perhaps not for dealing fentanyl but any crime. Like lacking documents. Or being an American child of undocumented parents. Or having the wrong tattoo.  Or – maybe Latinos should be deported for no reason at all. Notably, the border patrol agent bears little resemblance to those who arrested Basora-Gonzalez: instead of a masked figure in body armor, the man appears older, stern, even sympathetic in an olive green quarter-zip. He just looks like a Boomer-age man you’d see around town.

If GPT-4o and future models help nefarious governments, OpenAI’s Altman doesn’t seem to mind. Like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg before him, he casts OpenAI as the innocent builder of a neutral platform that, in the name of free speech, might be used by bad actors. In a post on X, Altman defended GPT-4o’s ability to generate “offensive stuff,” writing, “we think putting this intellectual freedom and control in the hands of users is the right thing to do.” By addressing debates about moderation and freedom of speech on social media, but not intellectual property theft, Altman positions users as political, not technology. So when governments weaponize AI for vulgar propaganda, it doesn’t necessarily damage the aura of harmlessness Altman’s team is clearly trying to build around OpenAI. It keeps the conversation focused on the content of these images, not whether the tools should exist at all. 

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin famously warned, upon seeing film’s rising popularity, that technologies enabling mass reproduction of images could fuel fascism. He reasoned, “Fascism sees its salvation in giving the masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” Social media and generative AI similarly offer frictionless expression, from re-sharing or participating in a viral trend to commenting, that masks their disempowerment as political or cultural agents. This expression is obviously powerful: it’s hard to see Trump’s political rise, Elon Musk’s centrality to American culture, or today’s memeified politics without it.

Generative AI, Altman insists, has the power to change the very nature of our social contract. But, more immediately, it represents an increasing appropriation of art by Big Tech. One is left to wonder, as the technology appears to wipe out the value of artistic skill and intellectual labor with each update, “What is art for?”

In an essay for the New Yorker, sci-fi author Ted Chiang punctured AI’s triumphalism with a simple truth. The point of art, he wrote, isn’t the final product of expression, nor is selling or showing work the point of expression. It is the process of struggling to write a perfect sentence or to hand-draw an animated film with 40 other artists, as Miyazaki did, that makes meaning. True expression requires committing yourself to seeing something through in its most awful, embarrassing stages, to withstand critique and doubt, to sustain feelings of discomfort and vulnerability not just for a few moments but for weeks, months, years, even a lifetime.

As Miyazaki has conveyed so compellingly in his films, it is laborious, loving, useful work that imparts self-knowledge and the understanding of shared struggle and humanity. You cannot skip to the end. You cannot just generate the artwork or the essay and get the learning and the satisfaction that the work imparts. When you forgo that labor, you let fascists, corporations, and all manner of elite actors make the act of expressing yourself so easy that you feel free, even agentive, as they take your rights from you. 

In a cramped basement space in New York’s SculptureCenter in early February, ventriloquist Sophia Becker adjusted the metal legs of a doll with long black hair, a single guarache made from metal, and an underwear-like piece made from medical materials that looks oddly fashionable.  “Oh god that feels good,” the doll chirped in a girlish voice, before complaining that she’s stiff from a lack of play. “The lookers come but they don’t touch. I wish they would touch!”

Becker was on hand for a one-night-only performance activating the exhibition, “Ideal Space for Music,” by Mexico-based artist-duo Hanya Beliá and Matias Armendaris, better known as ASMA. Becker puppetted the doll as she delivered a monologue about her life as an art piece, sitting in a museum. The room was packed, with an overflow audience watching a livestream on the floor above. Becker guided the audience into another room where another doll waited for her chance to come alive, this time to sing a song. The ventriloquy was followed by a musical performance by the interdisciplinary artist and DJ Esra Canoğullari, also known as 8ULENTINA, which included elements from foley sound production to accentuate the theatrical aspects of the exhibition.

The past year has been decisive for the duo, which is represented by Mexico City’s PEANA and House of Gaga, which has locations in Los Angeles and Guadalajara. Last October, they opened the SculptureCenter exhibition—their first institutional show—and then, just weeks later, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit opened its own show of their work, “Wander & Pursuit,” which closed in late February. They also have upcoming presentations at Art Basel in June with House of Gaga and at the Singapore Biennale in October.

For “Ideal Space for Music,” which runs until March 24, ASMA used SculptureCenter’s basement to reflect on the subconscious, a consistent theme over the course of their nine-year collaboration (which is perhaps unsurprising considering Armendaris’s mother’s career as an art therapist). The exhibition includes a series of metal spheres, a video work, soundscapes, ink paintings, and light fixtures made from found objects, transforming the cold concrete space into a bunker of the mind, a post-traumatic landscape of the collective psychology in which the dolls reside.

“It felt different making this work, we don’t usually use the body, the figure, to communicate our ideas about the unconscious,” Beliá told ARTnews after the performance ended. “We could feel it in the studio, when they came alive. All the parts were missing but the tension was there, and she could stand on her own. It was like magic.”

After building the internal structure of the dolls, Beliá and Armendaris used found and sculpted objects to slowly piece together each doll’s unique body and sensibility: scraps of denim, synthetic hair, a piece of a clarinet, a sink faucet, a dental impression tray, and silicone, to name a few of the materials that came together to create each dolls’ particular personality.

Dolls have a long literary, psychoanalytic, and artistic history that ASMA drew from for the show. In conversations with ARTnews, the duo referenced Hans Bellmer, whose radical, grotesque, and sexual doll works got him labeled as a degenerate by the Nazi regime and Rainer Maria Rilke’s writing on the dolls of Lotte Pritzel, in which the dolls emerge as objects of uncanny contamination in which the human and the material are mixed in psychologically powerful ways.

“We mixed in the doll, as if in a test-tube, everything we were experiencing and could not recognize…The doll was so utterly devoid of imagination that what we imagined for it was inexhaustible.” Rilke wrote in “The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls.” “But I have to believe there were certain abysmally long afternoons when our twofold inspirations petered out and we suddenly sat in front of it, expecting some response.” 

In a way, Rilke’s meditation on dolls might be a fitting analogy for an artist’s experience with her materials. Yet, the image of the artist straining to project fantasies onto an unresponsive object is the inverse of what ASMA attempts in their practice. Instead of projecting their ideas onto materials, they immerse themselves in laborious material processes in the hopes of producing a collaboration between themselves and their emerging object. This has resulted in a reputation for complex works in which silicone is married with wood, electrical fixtures, brass, and even old desktop computers. This interest in hybridity is embedded in their joint practice. 

In their independent practices, Beliá worked as a painter and a writer, while Armendaris worked in printmaking and drawing. But in 2016, when Belia was 21 and Armendaris was 25, the artists began sharing a studio space in Mexico City’s Centro Historico neighborhood. The neighborhood itself has had an enormous influence on the artist’s practices, as ancient architecture and local industry collide into a diverse riot of materials and aesthetics. They quickly  found an intense overlap in their interests which grew into a budding collaboration.

“We started assisting each other, but very soon we started having authority over decisions made about each other’s work, so we decided to make it formal. We gave each other six months to experiment,” said Beliá. “We never thought we would work together for so long.” 

(Beliá and Armendaris are also romantically involved.)

In order to find a medium that would be truly shared, the duo settled on sculptural practices whose hybrid nature not only spoke to their jointly made work but their interest in critiquing binaries of the polluted and the pure, the natural and the artificial. But even as they have constantly evolved what materials they work with, their consistency in theme and conceptual approach ensures that their work is always identifiably ASMA at its core.

Since the pandemic ended, ASMA has shifted their approach to be less focused on objects and more focused on creating psychological landscapes as opportunities to show internationally and in larger spaces to expand the scale of their practice. Their show “Wander & Pursuit,” which first showed at House of Gaga Los Angeles in 2022, offered the artists their first opportunity to test this new phase of the work. For the show, the duo built an office space embedded with silicone paintings full of chivalric symbols: the mirror, the castle, the knight, the enchanted woods.  

“With this work we turned away from the speculative to the angst of the present,” said Armendaris. In asking questions about the relationship between the decorative and the utilitarian, space and the people who inhabit it, and industrial materials and symbolic archetypes, ASMA worked to materialize our deepest, most unknown selves in the environments that shape us. That act of translating interiority is the foundation of ASMA’s practice. 

“We are always translating between ourselves,” said Armendaris. 

“We have different images in our minds of what the work will be because we have two different minds,” Beliá added. “In the process of making the work together, figuring it out, we end up somewhere we could have never imagined. Maybe if I worked independently, I would have more control and be able to execute more exactly the image that I had of the work.”

But, as the duo explained, that vision of control isn’t appealing. 

“When we first began we realized we make better work together,” said Beliá. “Collaborating is hard but for us it’s worth it because we like the work that comes out of it.”

In the eyes of ASMA, however, their act of creation is not dyadic, but triadic. They not only translate their own minds for each other, but must translate the resulting synthesis through materials in whose limits and affordances they find something beyond themselves. This is a necessarily laborious process and, for the duo, they never take shortcuts. For example, they are currently teaching themselves pate de verre, an ancient Egyptian glass making technique popularized by French nouveau artists. With no masters of the technique in Mexico, ASMA is teaching themselves the techniques from books. Yet, even when teachers are available, they prefer to teach themselves. 

“It would probably be easier to learn from people—and that can be beautiful. But there is something about investigating, thinking of how you’re going to do it, finding books, and in that process, there are failures that bring you to new places,” said Beliá. 

“You end up discovering the muscle of a material this way instead of the language of the material,” continued Armendaris. “The time that you put into an analog process creates a transformation, it becomes the perfection of the idea. We don’t want to lose what you can learn by making things.”

In an era where AI-generated images and text creep further and further into our media lanscape—and the physical world—ASMA’s deep and slow engagement with artisanal practices carries even more gravity without being regressive or nostalgic. 

Whether it’s a doll composed of found parts or exploring the psycho-social landscape of the corporate office, ASMA’s work feels futuristic by being tightly engaged in the present, even when they’re looking to the past. Somehow, given enough time, the duo can turn an ancient technique like pate de verre into an opportunity to explore the neverending interplay between the mind and the world it is embedded in. They just have to respect the process.

Not even an hour into the opening of The Art Show, the annual fair of the Art Dealers Association of America, New York dealer Charles Moffett had sold half of the seven egg tempera on wood New York City-scapes by emerging artist C’naan Hamburger he had on view—priced $8,000 to $15,000—and had the other half on hold. By the end of the night, he had sold five. That was a strong result, Moffett told ARTnews, considering the state of the market.

“The first time I worked the fair it was 2008. I was just out of school, working for another gallery, and the phone barely rang,” he said. “You could draw some comparisons to the current moment in terms of the pace of the market.”

On Tuesday evening, 75 of the ADAA’s 200 member galleries gathered in the creaking hall of the Park Avenue Armory for the benefit preview of the 36th edition of The Art Show, a philanthropic fair that raises funds for the social services non-profit Henry Street Settlement. (All ticket proceeds go to the organization, with the fair having raised $37 million in its history.)

Of the 75 exhibitors at the fair, 43 have single artist presentations, a good number of which are, like Moffett’s focused on contemporary artists. (This is the first solo presentation for Hamburger, a 2023 graduate of the Hunter MFA program.)

That figure is notable considering that The Art Show has typically been associated with secondary market, historical works. It shows in the demographic of the crowd, which skews older, or as one dealer delicately put it, “the philanthropic crowd.”

“It’s people from the neighborhood,” David Norr, a partner at James Cohan, which operates galleries in Tribeca and the Lower East Side, told ARTnews. Norr was referring, of course, to the Upper East Side. “They’re a dedicated group of discerning collectors who know exactly what they like. Honestly, it’s kind of refreshing,” he added.

So while some exhibitors at The Art Show are catering to the tastes of an older generation of connoisseurs, the ADAA has been adding more primary and younger dealers to the association in recent years, meaning that there is now both historical and contemporary work on view. While that mixes up the offering, it now feels more unclear what kind of collector the fair is for. Something for everyone, perhaps? 

The Art Show has shifted into a more regional fair, according to some dealers at the fair, largely due to its isolation in the social calendar. Prior to the pandemic, the fair historically led into the Armory Fair in New York, and all the assorted events and openings that happen alongside it. That helped draw an international crowd of collectors and curators. That’s trickier now, though the fair still gets its share of notable guests, including the Hammer Museum’s Nicole Berry, curator Raquel Chevremont (now a cast member on The Real Housewives of New York), Studio Museum director Thelma Golden, Art Basel Miami Beach director Bridget Finn, Frieze US Fairs director Christine Messineo, powerhouse art advisor Sandy Heller, and others.

“The fair exists on an island now,” Derek Piech, a partner at Chelsea’s Mary Ryan Gallery, told ARTnews. “There are no other concurrent fair or major auction previews to bring in a critical mass of attendees. But look, this is the only peer-reviewed art fair in the world. All of the booths at this fair were voted on by the members of the ADAA organization, and for that reason, you continue to see an excellent showing of interesting new work and fantastic older material across the range.”

Meanwhile, dealers are back from Frieze London, Paris Basel, and all the satellite fairs in both cities, which had encouraging performances within the context of this year’s sleepy market. Still, next week’s presidential election is looming.

“Obviously, the election is top of mind,” Daelyn Farnham, a senior director at San Francisco’s Altman Siegel, told ARTnews. “It can be hard to get people’s attention in a moment like this.”

Farnham said that while sales weren’t stunning for the gallery in London, Frieze provided a ton of exposure for the gallery and its artists to curators. Paris, meanwhile, was energetic. And why not? 

“Everyone wants to be in Paris in October,” said Norr. “But energy doesn’t necessarily translate to sales.”

And while the opening night energy at The Art Show translated into those five sales for Moffett, a first-time exhibitor at the fair with his eponymous gallery, he nevertheless said that, in this soft market, one has to always think about “adjusting expectations.” Just a few years ago, work was flying off the walls and getting flipped soon afterwards. That’s simply no longer the case.

“We used to sell out shows just by sending out PDFs,” Moffett said. “Now it takes the full run of a fair, or a show. It just takes more work than it used to.”

It’s in times like these that we need to get back to the basics, art advisor Michael Altman told me after a firm introductory handshake.

“This is a market of individual objects,” he said. “In a good market, a great picture always sells, and it sells well. In a bad market, a great picture will sell too, just not as … buoyantly. In a good market you’ll make back what you bought it for plus 20 percent. This is why there isn’t that much great stuff available. Collectors are gonna wait for that 20 percent.” 

So, the market is cyclical. Please, write that down. Another good piece of advice? Just wait.

“The Fed has finally addressed the interest rates so let’s see how that affects the market, especially at the higher end, in six months,” said Maureen Bray, ADAA’s executive director.

“People want to give me their money, and I say, ‘Okay!’” said Talal Abillama, founder of Gratin gallery, as he ate Peking duck and sesame noodles this past May. Initially, this came off as naive, but I gradually realized that it was just this kind of projection of ease that attracts collectors and artists alike to begin with.

The 27-year-old New York gallerist has made a name for himself in the two years since he opened Gratin gallery, which just took over 47 Canal’s old space on Grand Street. Young artists want to work with him, and he’s known for bringing success to relatively unknown talents. Having Abillama represent you is about as close as an emerging artist can get to having a fairy-godmother.

We chatted this past May, just a few days after his opening for the French artist Elise Nguyen Quoc, who was showing nine of her gray-toned paintings. Initially, she wasn’t sure Gratin was the right fit for her.

“When I saw his program, I thought that it wasn’t the best, but it would do,” said Nguyen Quoc. Abillama winced, but she continued on: “But it’s amazing. The work has been sold out for weeks. In France, this doesn’t happen. Maybe after the opening, some works are sold. And there’s a waitlist—I can’t believe how long it is.” 

At the time, it hadn’t even been a year since Nguyen Quoc graduated with a graduate degree from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2023. The fact that Abillama has managed to build her market in such a short amount of time is impressive, yet it’s not unusual for the young gallerist. 

He claims that collectors really respond to him, that they find him “nice and welcoming” (some people close to him refer to him as “teddy bear”), that he has a good eye for art and a gut instinct for talent. As if it’s all so simple as that. 

Abillama was born and raised in Beirut by a family with a long history of collecting, though he tends to play that down. “They are very conservative,” he explained. “They like the big names—Warhol, Basquiat. They collected some of the Italians.” 

That’s a bit of an understatement. His family has a world-class collection that includes works by Richard Serra, Louise Bourgeois, John Baldessari, and Yayoi Kusama. He is similarly evasive about the nature of his family’s wealth, eliding certain details: “My father works in Africa, the Middle East. He has companies in Japan.” 

Al-Amir Holdings, the company run by Abillama’s father and uncles, is nearly 100 years old. It began in Lebanon as a coachbuilding business before expanding into its current portfolio of global real estate, architecture, and manufacturing.

Though Abillama grew up surrounded by art at home, his grandfather’s habit of taking him to museums left a more lasting mark. But initially, he seemed more poised to become a businessman, leaving Beirut at 18 for a brief stint in London before moving to Boston to attend Northeastern University. His family pushed him to study business there, hoping that Abillama might one day help run the family company. Yet he spent nearly every weekend in New York, seeing exhibitions and making friends with the dealers, collectors, and artists. 

By the time he was 19, he said, he had sold his first artwork, a Sterling Ruby piece, for $300,000. He used the money to buy art and quickly got into the habit of buying something new every week. It wasn’t too long before he was working for Vito Schnabel, selling artworks and discovering talent. (His family owns the building that houses Vito Schnabel Gallery.) 

On at least one occasion, Abillama’s business practices have received some negative attention. In 2022, Artnet News reported on claims that he failed to pay for an artwork on time. When a New York dealer behind the now defunct Mother Gallery told her social network about the allegedly broken deal, Abillama became “threatening,” according to the report. He denied to Artnet that he spoke down to the dealer and said that he canceled the sale because he felt the dealer was being too aggressive about payment. (He declined to comment further for this article.)

During the pandemic, Abillama decided it was time to start his own gallery with a program focused on introducing New York audiences to young international artists. He enlisted the help of his childhood best friend, Tarek Haraoui, then an underpaid underling at Deloitte, to become a founding partner and Abillama’s right-hand man. Another early staffer at the gallery was Max Werner, the son of storied New York dealers Mary Boone and Michael Werner, who eventually moved on but remains on good terms with Abillama.

So far, the gallery represents seven artists from seven different countries. All of them are painters, minus Ziad Antar, a photographer who has had few New York showings since appearing in a 2014 New Museum show about Arab art. Above all, Abillama said that the most important criterion for taking on an artist is whether the relationship will work out in the long term. “I want to work with the same artists for the next 40 years, whether they’re selling well or not,” he explained.

Being able to grow with his artists means not taking on too many. “I want them to feel special, because when you make someone feel special you get the very best from them,” said Abillama about his approach to managing artists. “I want them to think only about the work, not about rent or paying the bills. I put myself in their shoes, I imagine what they want, and then I work for them. Do they want a show in Europe? Let’s arrange it. A bigger gallery, to show bigger work? The new space is three times the size.”

Abillama’s ambition, no doubt in part aided by his wealth and social network, has gained him admiration from heavy hitters in the art world. “He’s not there for the money, he’s there for the passion, and that’s why he’s going to be very successful,” said Loïc Gouzer, a former head of contemporary art at Christie’s who now runs the Fair Warning auction platform. Doesn’t it take money not to care about having it? Gouzer snapped back in frustration, “I know people with resources who don’t do shit. I don’t think it’s even a parameter. There are people who make things happen, and there are people who don’t.”

What does it take to be someone who makes things happen? Lorenzo Amos, Gratin’s only US-born artist, has a sense of what the X factor might be.

“He’s not delusional. But he’s a little bit delusional,” said Amos. “But he always manages to bridge the gap.”

Amos has taken over Gratin’s original space in the East Village as a temporary studio in preparation for his first solo show with the gallery. He is only 22 years old, with no formal education in the arts—just the rent-controlled apartment where he grew up and where he paints his friends, lying on the carpet, drinking on the couch, and leaning against the walls that Amos has used as a place to clean his brushes. He acknowledged that the arrangement was unusual, but Abillama was willing to indulge an artist as untested as him. Perhaps Abillama’s most crucial offering to his artists is a bit of hand holding. 

“Low key, I’m a drama queen, I’m a diva,” said Amos. “But he has a lot of patience. He makes you feel like you’re special, like you’re good, like what you’re doing is good.”

Christoph Matthes, the artist whose work is currently the subject of a show at Gratin, was similarly at the start of his career when Abillama contacted him. Matthes struggled for a few years after he graduated with an MFA, watching others in his generation land solo shows and gallery representation. He joined a punk band as a bassist, made work, and tried to keep the faith. Since meeting Abillama, he has had the glow of good fortune. “I see how hard he is working for me,” Matthes said. “It’s motivating.”

It was instructive to watch Abillama at work during the opening for Matthes’s show. The crowd around Abillama skewed young and international, with lots of French and Spanish in the air (the second official language of the gallery is French, in which Abillama and director Andrea Torriglia de Altolaguirre are both fluent). As tequila flowed, Abillama was busy making introductions, wearing, as always, a T-shirt, no slick suit or flashy pieces. 

But the true event of the night was yet to come: an afterparty at Abillama’s apartment, where a living room bleeds out into a terrace, inviting smokers to drift in and out. I scanned the white carpet anxiously for ash. There was an Alice Neel on the wall and a huge, pink Paul McCarthy sculpture by the dining room table. There was staff at the bar outside and chefs working in the kitchen. Haraoui DJed via the Spotify app on his phone while Matthes spent the night glued to his girlfriend. Competing lines for second helpings of uni, pasta, and steak formed. Abillama winked at me—“The best food in New York.” He wasn’t wrong. 

It didn’t take long for the show to sell out. Abillama said that “a lot of bigger galleries” wanted to sign Matthes. Ngyuen Quoc and Amos also said the same thing happened after they showed with Gratin.

But none of them chose to leave. These artists said they merely forwarded the messages from others dealers to Abillama, then continued on with his gallery.

“I’ve always thought I care more about artists than other people,” said Abillama. “I can’t disappoint them. They can’t disappoint me. I talk to them every day, so if they ever leave, they will feel my absence.”

When Edmund Cartwright was at work creating the world’s first power loom at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, he sent a prototype of his machine to weavers in Manchester, which was, at the time, the center of England’s cloth production. Cartwright was hoping these weavers could help him improve his nascent invention. They refused.

As recounted in Blood in the Machine, tech journalist Brian Merchant’s history of the Luddite movement, textile workers destroyed the machines and factories that had undermined their wages, lowered the quality of working conditions, and eventually, made them obsolete. Understandably, weavers were not keen to contribute to something intended to replace them. Their choice was no mystery to Cartwright.

“Indeed, the workmen who had undertaken it despaired of ever making it answer the purpose it was intended for,” wrote Cartwright in a letter to a friend.

More than two hundred years later, we are living amid another pivotal moment in labor history: the widespread introduction of artificial intelligence. But unlike the weavers of yore, there are artists and creatives who are willing to cooperate with companies developing the very tools designed to replace them—or, at least, diminish their labor—whether it’s contemporary artists accepting residencies or filmmakers joining beta testing programs.

Why?

For artists like Refik Anadol and Alex Reben, who have been artists-in-residence for NVIDIA and OpenAI, respectively, there is simply no threat of “being replaced” akin to what the now extinct weavers experienced. Artists with a capital A don’t work in a traditional labor market, so opportunities to work with AI companies represent an exciting opportunity to bend powerful new technology into new artistic tools.

“AI is the new canvas. This is the new painting. This is the new brush,” Anadol told ARTnews. “So NVIDIA is providing a brush, they’re providing a pigment, they’re providing a canvas.”

Anadol has found major success using machine-learning algorithms to produce site-specific immersive installations, live audiovisual performances, and artworks tokenized on the blockchain. In his practice, Anadol primarily creates “data sculptures” that visualize vast quantities of data on everything from the environment to art history. The artist became Google’s first artist-in-residence in 2016, the same year he began working with NVIDIA. The two companies provided the support to make works that require significant data-processing both when he was an artist-in-residence and as an independent artist.

In 2022 Anadol worked with the Museum of Modern Art in New York to create Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA, a generative artwork that uses the museum’s visual archive to produce a machine learning model that interprets and reimagines images of artworks in MoMA’s collection. The museum acquired the work after it was displayed in the lobby for nearly a year.

For Unsupervised, NVIDIA donated two supercomputers: one to process the 138,000 images in the museum’s public archive and the other to “dream” the visualization displayed on a 24-foot-tall high-res screen. What NVIDIA gave Anadol was not software—Anadol and his studio work together to write custom software—but sheer processing power, which is, at best, extremely cost-prohibitive.

“To make work with AI you need strong computation,” Anadol explained. “There’s no way to do research or work with millions of images without supercomputers, and I’m not a company or a giant that can buy billions of dollars’ worth of GPUs [graphics processing units].”

NVIDIA makes Anadol’s art possible, and not just Unsupervised, but most of his work. NVIDIA, he added, doesn’t donate this computing power for monetary gain but rather because they want to support artistic discoveries and breakthroughs.

Alex Reben, meanwhile, told ARTnews that artists and artist-researchers have always worked with companies and institutions to develop and test the potential of new tools, whether Xerox machines, acrylic paint, or computer plotters.

In the late 1960s, artists Harold Cohen and Vera Molnár made some of the first computer artworks in the late 1960s after gaining access to university research labs. Around the same time, engineers from Bell Laboratories teamed up with artists to create Experiments in Art and Technology, a nonprofit that facilitated collaboration between artists and engineers. Electrical engineer Billy Klüver, a founder of the group, worked with John Cage, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and other artists to create groundbreaking projects. In the late 1980s, composer Tod Machover began creating computer-enhanced Hyperinstruments like the Hyperviolin and Hyperpiano at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab.

As with early computers, accessing AI—a metonym for many different but related technologies—has meant accessing the institutions that develop them. But, these days, it is businesses more than universities that have the kind of processing power artists are hungry to work with.

At the Christie’s Art and Tech Summit this past July, Reben gave me a demo of the “conceptual camera” he developed as an artist-in-residence at OpenAI, the preeminent generative AI company of the moment, having released industry-leading platforms like text generator ChatGPT, image generator DALL-E, and the recently unveiled video generator, Sora. Reben, who began working with OpenAI as a beta tester years ago, built the conceptual camera as an AI software application. The app took photos captured on his phone and then transformed them, using DALL-E, into AI-generated artworks printed out on Polaroids, or poems printed out as receipts. During an earlier Zoom demonstration, the app had come off as slightly gimmicky, but in person, the demo filled me with genuine wonder. Reben handed me a marker and told me to draw a picture. I doodled the devil. After he took a picture of the drawing, he tapped a couple buttons on the app and then we watched the photo develop on the Polaroid printer. The black square revealed the AI-generated image that took inspiration from my drawing: a ghostly figure emerged, a mannequin head sporting ram horns. The program never makes the same image twice and produces them in a variety of styles.

The technology required to produce the image was impressive, but, looking past the sparkle, it raised complicated ethical questions. For artist, writer, and activist Molly Crabapple, AI companies like NVIDIA, OpenAI, and others, represent environmental degradation and massive job loss for creatives.

“These companies are trying to launder their reputations by using high-end artists so they can say they are the friends of artists when in reality they are kicking working-class artists in the teeth every day,” Crabapple told ARTnews. “They’re just scabbing. And given the environmental costs of AI, it’s the equivalent of doing a residency with British Petroleum.”

In May, Goldman Sachs Research estimated that data center power consumption will grow by 160 percent by 2030 due to AI, while carbon dioxide emissions from those centers may double. Meanwhile, both Google and Microsoft have made revisions to their sustainability goals, which Wired and the Wall Street Journal have reported is tied to their AI power consumption.

Crabapple makes a distinction between “high-end” artists who sell their original artwork, show at institutions and galleries, and have a certain kind of prestige versus working artists like illustrators or animators who are hired by clients to make a particular artistic or commercial product, anything from an advertisement to a Pixar movie. In her view, by working with the former, tech companies shift the conversation from job obsoletion to new forms of creativity.

The tech giants have typically pushed the line that AI will make jobs more efficient or productive, not obsolete. However, during a talk at Dartmouth this past June, OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati bungled the company line.

“Maybe some creative jobs will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” she told the crowd.

Crucially, the “creative jobs” Murati referenced are not those held by contemporary fine artists, who don’t do wage work and so are not vulnerable to the whims of bosses trying to cut down on labor costs. Working artists, like the animators and illustrators that Crabapple talks about, are thus faced with a tough decision: resist automation to try to keep artistic traditions alive, or retrain their skills.

For Sway Molina, an actor, artist, and filmmaker who started working last year with AI during the ongoing hiring slump in the film industry (dubbed the Hollywood Contraction), the answer is simple: join up before it’s too late. Molina is a member of AI company Runway’s Creative Partners Program, a beta testing program that provides qualified creatives with early access to Runway’s text-to-video building tools.

“Everything is going to shift and change in ten years, and those who stay behind are the people that resist,” Molina told ARTnews.

While Molina might come off as harsh, he said he simply doesn’t have much faith that film unions will be able to protect jobs when studios eventually cut deals with AI companies. (Bloomberg reported in May that Alphabet and Meta have already approached film studios about potential partnerships.)

The job loss appears to have begun already. The Animation Guild, meanwhile, found in its AI Task Force study, released this past January, that 75 percent of survey respondents—which included hundreds of C-suite leaders, senior executives, and mid-level managers across six key entertainment industries—said that generative AI tools, software, or models had already resulted in job elimination, reduction, or consolidation in their business division. (One bright spot: only 26 percent thought generative AI would be fully integrated in the next three years.) This past July, Merchant reported for Wired that job losses in the video game industry are already in the thousands, and remaining artists are being forced to use AI in their creative process.

“Generative AI can most capably produce 2D images that managers in cost-squeezed studios might consider ‘good enough,’ a term AI-watching creative workers now use as shorthand for the kind of AI output that’s not a threat to replacing great art, but is a threat to their livelihoods,” Merchant wrote.

For Molina, adopting early means protecting against his own job loss. “It’s the early tinkerers of today that become the creative leaders of tomorrow,” Molina said. “Those people who are just endlessly posting, posting, posting their AI works are the [ones] being set up as creative directors and AI community leaders.”

In the spirit of showing his colleagues what AI is poised to do, Molina produced a feature-length parody of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), starring a cyborg teddy bear and loaded with jokes about AI spoken with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s thick Austrian accent, his likeness and voice reconstituted and remixed courtesy of new AI tools from Runway and other companies. The movie, Our T2 Remake (2024), is nearly unwatchable, with uncanny figures, objects that don’t obey the laws of physics, and faces that morph and melt without logic. And yet, it was made in 6 months as opposed to the usual 6 years, with 50 animators instead of hundreds.

With the tech developing so rapidly, one can squint and see where generative AI might be going. At least that’s what AI companies are hoping.

“We joke and say that if our tools can’t do something that you want now, maybe just wait a few weeks and likely we’ll be able to do it by then, because that is quite literally how quickly it has been moving,” Emily Golden, who heads growth marketing at Runway, which includes the Creative Partners Program, told ARTnews.

Many AI companies have beta testing programs similar to Runway’s, Golden said, adding that Runway hopes to use its own to build community. On X, users experimenting with text-to-video generation post their clips, music videos, surreal shorts, crowd-sourced solutions, and discuss developments in the field. While some are longtime creatives, many have never made images or videos before using AI tools. The community provides Runway early (and copious) testing of its products—before they go out to clients—and free marketing.

Whether it’s fine artists like Anadol and Reben taking up artist residencies or working artists joining beta testing programs, the advantage seems to be getting early access to cutting-edge tools that both they and the tech companies that make them can point to as expanding creativity, rather than killing jobs.

And yet, the numbers speak for themselves.

When Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak took the stage for the final talk on Wednesday at the Christie’s Art + Tech Summit, a sea of iPhones rose into the air to photograph tech’s living legend. And while Wozniak came off as the archetypal excitable inventor, he quickly bemoaned tech companies’ recent turn away from making reliable, problem-solving products. 

“I see two digital worlds,” Wozniak said. The first, he said, was the moment he came up in, dominated by the invention of new products people could buy. The second is the present, with its focus on endless updates and subscription plans. It’s perhaps no surprise then that Wozniak spoke fairly derisively about artificial intelligence, an ill-defined, hyped technology with vague applications that has nevertheless raked in hundreds of billions of dollars in private capital (as well as government subsidies) in the US alone, according to the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

“I used to ride my bicycle over to the Stanford campus to watch a machine pick up a blue ball and put it into a blue box,” Wozniak said. “It only understood simple rules and now it understands more.” 

Wozniak openly struggled with the imbalance between the value of the new technology and the investment it has garnered, not to mention the high costs it incurs—and he wasn’t the only one at the conference to do so.

Though Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame said he made a nice chunk of change investing in NVIDIA, a leading AI company, he spent most of his talk focusing on buying watches, advertising on cable, and doing business in the UAE. When it comes to AI, O’Leary said, the industry is quickly approaching the “show me” phase and finding out that most of what hyped-up tech founders call AI is really just run-of-the-mill data mining and science. 

“So, not so fast bubble–ooey,” he said. “Show me how it works and where I get my return.”

O’Leary’s suggestion that the AI investment bubble is about to pop echoes a fairly pessimistic report released in June by Goldman Sachs titled “GenAI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?” In the report, Goldman Sachs’ Head of Global Equity Research Jim Covello was quoted saying, “Truly life-changing inventions like the internet enabled low-cost solutions to disrupt high-cost solutions even in its infancy, unlike costly AI tech today.” Other analysts quoted in the report said that AI’s “killer application” has yet to emerge and that it would take another ten years for its applications to become cost-effective. 

A lack of clear-cut applications makes the energy expenditure in AI seem all the more irrational. As tech consultant Sol Rashidi mentioned in the “Real Applications of AI” panel at Christie’s, OpenAI alone uses the equivalent of double the annual energy needs of France in a single year. She added that the US grid would have to be completely rehauled to meet the energy demands necessitated by mass adoption of AI. (Oddly enough, neither of the panelists on another talk, “The Role of Art in the Sustainability Discourse,” had anything to say about that).

Still, other panelists at the summit groped for AI’s applications. In three separate panels, Randy Hunt, head of design at Notion, Ashley Ferro-Murray, program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Foundation, and Dr. Zhou Yu, co-founder of Articulate.AI, pointed to AI’s potential to increase productivity.

“The AI can do the most tedious tasks and the humans can do the complex tasks and decision making. It will act as a complement to human teams,” Zhou said, trotting out the usual line at the “AI: From Research to Practice” panel.

Meanwhile, numerous panelists obliquely referred to the fears around AI, offering reassurances without ever saying the words automation, labor, climate change, or super-intelligence. At the same panel as Zhou, Dr. Sanjeev Arora, a computer science professor at Princeton University, typified this vagueness. 

“There are these big sci-fi-like questions we’ve been asking and … it’s still an open question,” he said. “We need more understanding and science about its capabilities that are not understood, we need some science and quantification. This tech is developed in a black box way.”

Not so reassuring. But regardless, what does any of this have to do with art? The one place in which AI has been adopted by users is in the creative realm, as multiple speakers noted.

“The creative space is where AI has had the biggest impact and I don’t think anyone could have predicted that,” Bob Muglia, the former CEO of the AI data cloud company Snowflake, said. Two years ago, at a past edition of the Christie’s Art + Tech Summit, crypto VC and ARTnews Top 200 collector Ryan Zurrer said almost exactly the same thing about NFTs: “No OG in the crypto space ever predicted that it would be art that brought us into the mainstream.” 

Yet despite the similarities in the respective hype-cycles of NFTs and AI—the primary one being that their use in the creative realm brought the technology into the daily lives of regular users, at least for a little while—things are playing out differently this time around. NFTs attracted many digital artists and technologists because it promised to solve a concrete problem: how to value, buy, and sell digital content and art. While AI is perhaps even more highly valued than NFTs ever were, its use-case is much murkier. 

At the summit, there was a striking lack of leaders from AI companies working on text-to-image or text-to-video generative AI. Those figures’ absence was interesting in the face of an already occurring—and supposedly, soon to expand—application of generative AI to the production of films, commercials, advertisements, slogans, articles, novels, and comics, as well as the attendant debates about automation in creative industries. Even on the panel “AI and the Future of Human Creativity,” the conversation stuck to whether or not AI can “truly” be creative when the fact is that generative-AI outputs are already being consumed by audiences on a mass scale. That uncomfortable and inconvenient reality was roundly ignored by the panelists.

Instead of hearing from executives at generative AI companies, the summit’s talks featured a number of artist-researchers–Alexander Reben and Refik Anadol, among others–who are developing their own AI tools for their art practices. Centering that non-threatening work is a pointed choice when there are AI companies like Runway, a video generation company, poised to supplant scores of creative industry jobs.

Toward the end of Wozniak’s talk, moderator and Global Head of Christie’s Ventures Devang Thakkar asked the tech luminary what he would do differently if he could do it all over again. “Pay more attention to business ethics,” Wozniak said firmly. 

Though Wozniak was speaking about concerns over monopolies, the lesson might easily be extended to looming concerns about AI and worker obsoletion. But Wozniak left Apple in 1985, and it’s the “move fast and break things” acolytes of Steve Jobs who run the industry now.

Who gets to profit from the TikTok-famous Renegade Dance? Or the viral catchphrase “on fleek”? When memes are by their very nature hyper-transmitted and endlessly remixed, is there any opportunity to “own” one’s innovations in the online cultural field? The problem of how to compensate digital labor and goods has animated scholars and popular thinkers for more than two decades now. Meanwhile, questions of appropriation as they relate to Black creators and subjects have been part of this discourse for nearly as long—time enough that a reviewer of Lauren Michele Jackson’s 2019 book White Negroes, about Black virality and appropriation, wrote that the topic might already have been “exhausted.” But Legacy Russell, author of the 2020 book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto as well as executive director and chief curator of the Kitchen art space in New York, believes there is more to be mined, as per her new book, Black Meme: The History of the Images that Make Us.

Russell’s book is not really about the internet, and it’s not really about appropriation. Black Meme is about virality, dispossession, and the complexities of being visible while Black. Russell asks what it is about Blackness that travels so far and wide. And why is it that images and videos of Black people dominate the visual field in such a way that white content creators feint at being Black to promote audience engagement? To answer these questions, Russell constructs a history that spans 19th-century postcards that commemorate lynchings to the first viral GIF.

Animating each of Russell’s case studies is her multifaceted definition of the “Black meme” as “the mediation, copying, and carrying of Blackness itself as a viral agent” predicated on the “promise of violence” and perpetual performance. The Black meme, she writes, is “as much about the transmission of Blackness as it is about the sight and viewership of Whiteness.” The Black meme shows us “that being seen and consumed does not correlate with being compensated.”

Russell’s Black meme does a lot of work to survey the point at which two major phenomena converge: debates about appropriation and the circulation of images and videos of Black people, often in moments of death or trauma. In Russell’s conception, to be perceived while Black is to be seen in pain, a pain that often acts as a trigger for justice. (She writes about well-known social crises surrounding figures such as Emmett Till, Rodney King, and Philando Castile.) What is agonizing about this is that images of Black pain continue to perform long after their political or social inflection point, in the sense that they continue to circulate and cannot reenter the communities from which they came and become private again.

The controversy over Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016) at the 2017 Whitney Biennial is a prime example (and, like nearly all of Russell’s case studies, has been extensively picked over already). Who was Schutz, as a white painter, to claim the image of Till, and to recirculate such a moment of pain and mourning? Referring to the context in which Till’s image was first published in 1955 in Jet, a magazine that had a majority Black readership, Russell writes, “the circulation of Till’s image within a site intended to be engaged for and by Black readers established a radical enclosure of collective intimacy.” But that isn’t necessarily a definitive view. In White Negroes, Jackson argues that, after the white press refused to publish Till’s image, Jet took on the charge “to force America to witness the gruesomeness it had wrought.” In Jackson’s telling, Jet was not an intimate enclosure but a launchpad for intentional virality.

It will always be terrible that suffering has to be put on display to prompt even a modicum of care. So, the question becomes: can images of the kind Russell writes about ever be taken back?

IT IS EVIDENT THAT RUSSELL longs for a controlled space of circulation to emerge within the media ecosystem. Black Meme is most exciting when she suggests paths that might change the way we circulate content, especially in online environments, and analyzes the factors that have led the internet to allow for unbounded transmission. Following the legal scholar K.J. Greene, who wrote extensively on reparations for Black musicians in the context of the illegal downloading mania of the early 2000s, Russell makes the connection between existing legal conceptions of intellectual property law, the public domain, and open-source culture.

A particularly effective example of the threads she weaves together is in her approach to the legal case Lanier v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. In 1850 Swiss zoologist and Harvard professor Louis Agassiz embarked on a research trip to the slave plantations of South Carolina, in search of what he called racially “pure” Africans to support the pseudoscientific theory of polygenism that claims different racial groups do not share common ancestry. Among the enslaved people that Agassiz visited were a man named Renty and his daughter Delia, both of whom Agassiz photographed. Agassiz used the resulting daguerreotypes in his report about polygenism, and they were later transferred to Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology; they were used to decorate brochures and other promotional and educational materials. More than 170 years later, in 2019, Renty’s descendant Tamara Lanier sued Harvard for unlawful possession of the daguerreotypes, claiming they had been taken without consent in the context of enslavement. Her demand was that the photos, thought to be the earliest known photographs of American slaves, be returned to Renty’s surviving family.

In 2021, after a county court granted Harvard’s motion to dismiss Lanier’s claims, she appealed, and the case was brought to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. As Renty and Delia were subjects and not authors, the court ruled that they had no property interest in the photo that Lanier could inherit. As it now stands, the physical daguerreotypes remain in the hands of Harvard, which has thus far made the images, both in physical and copied manifestations, available to the public.

The Harvard Law Review (HLR) suggested that the aim of the court was to allow the images of Renty and Delia to continue circulating, even as the judges recognized the context of slavery and expressed a wish for redress. As was stated in an HLR essay on the case, “what likely made the court wary to recognize some sort of property interest in Lanier was its fear that privatization of the daguerreotypes will result in lack of public access to all sorts of historical images.” But public access as a standard of fairness is something that Russell pushes back on, writing, “this exercise of ‘collective ownership,’ made possible by Harvard placing Renty and Delia’s images into the public domain, echoes the model of ‘open source’ that doubles down as a tactic of dispossession.”

Some internet history: In the early aughts, open-source movements popularized the norm of making code available for public use, and much of the development of Web 1.0 was credited to the free sharing of important knowledge. At the time, it was easy to position the open-source ethos as inherently radical, such that thinkers could write all moon-eyed about a budding high-tech gift economy founded on free labor, and free content as well. But this belief ignored the fact that preexisting power structures dictate who ultimately gets to profit from what is freely shared.

Greene wrote about this issue in the context of how innovations in music by Black musicians went unprotected and uncompensated while white musicians made financial killings. This was possible because Black musicians created wholly new styles, a category that is not covered by copyright law. In his 2008 legal article “‘Copynorms,’ Black Cultural Production, and the Debate Over African-American Reparations,” Greene wrote, “the work of Black artists was so extensively appropriated as to essentially dedicate Black innovation in cultural production into the public domain.”

In Black Meme, Russell applies this thinking beyond cultural production to Blackness in all its viral and visible manifestations. “When we engage Blackness as mythology,” the author writes, “it becomes open-source material, meaning that it can be hacked, circulated, gamified, memed, and reproduced. It is this open-source model that drives what social scientist Kwame Holmes expands on as a form of ‘necrocapitalism’—an extension of political theorist Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics—that makes ‘the value of Black death’ a fungible commodity, worthy of exchange.”

In a country where rights follow property relations, to claim distress without such relations is to be without recourse, grasping at what is “owned” but never recognized. The project of Black scholarship has often been to create a sense of boundedness around Black cultural production such that it might be recognized as something that can be not just compensated but claimed and protected beyond commercial ends. Factor in the internet, and the complexity of the situation soars.

As Russell writes, “To adequately address the economy of unpaid labor triggered by these transmissions on loop necessitates a breaking and remaking of digitality, one predicated on new definitions of authorship. The internet now is the largest institution of visual culture on earth. If this is the case, our very definitions of provenance must be better stipulated and restructured to encompass the study of Black movement and sound as they travel digitally.”

Russell’s plea is powerful, but she more or less stops there, at the point where such work could really begin. Black Meme mentions potential solutions, but mostly in passing. The book references but does not really explain writer Harmony Holiday’s concept of “mimetic emancipation.” And artist Rashaad Newsome’s FUBU (for us, by us) model of viral voguing, meant to renegotiate what Russell describes as “the exposure of queer and Black space as an encrypted third place,” isn’t developed in relation to the idea of the Black meme.

Instead, Russell mentions some of the obstacles to compensation for Black memes, among them the fact that experiences online are valued less than ones offline, even as the potential audience online is far greater. Moreover, certain creators like TikTok dance choreographers argue that they help popularize the music they use, such that these creators are “doubly overlooked” in terms of compensation.

NFTs are dismissed as a potential solution, for they represent “the master’s tools of capitalist monetization in minting their virality.” Because blockchain technologies merely reward attention and are not rooted in “Black, Brown, and queer movement or language,” they merely replicate the existing issue of white creators profiting from Black contributions to the meme pool.

Russell writes that creators of Black memes must “strike, rebel, refuse, mutiny.” She ends the book with powerful commands—“Reparations now! Free the Black meme!”—but these exhortations feel somewhat hollow in the absence of any action that could be connected to such phrases or any new adaptations to the fundamentally unique ways that the internet has changed how we circulate media, the kinds of pain we see, the effects of that pain, and the way we value (or fail to value) cultural production as it exists online. Russell’s contribution is to provide a clear history of how Black performance and pain have consistently molded cultural transmission and hyper-transmission. So yes, “Free the Black meme!” But how?  

Digital artist Sam Spratt is living the artist’s dream. This week, he celebrated the opening of “The Monument Game,” his first-ever art show. But it wasn’t a group show in some DIY space in New York, where he is based, like so many artists typically start out, but a solo exhibition in Venice, during the art world’s biggest event of the year—the Venice Biennale. How did Spratt–a virtually unknown name in the art world–make such a tremendous leap? With a little help from his friends, of course, including Ryan Zurrer, the venture capitalist turned digital art champion.

“Something the capital ‘A’ art world doesn’t recognize is the power of the collective, it sometimes leans into the cult of the individual,” Ryan Zurrer told ARTnews during a preview of the opening. “But this show is supported by the entire community around Sam.” 

Spratt’s Venice exhibition was put on by 1OF1 Collection, a “collecting club” set up by Zurrer to nurture digital artists working in the NFT space. Since its launch in 2021, 1OF1 has been uniquely successful in bridging the gap between the art world and the Web3 community. Last year, 1OF1 and the RFC Art Collection gifted Anadol’s Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA to the museum, after nearly a year on view in the Gund Lobby. Zurrer also arranged the first museum presentations of Beeple’s HUMAN ONE, a seven-foot-tall kinetic sculpture based on video works, showing it first at Castello di Rivoli in Italy and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, before sending it to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. 

With “The Monument Game,” Zurrer is once again placing digitally native art at the center of the art world. While Anadol and Beeple had large cultural footprints prior to Zurrer’s patronage, Spratt is far earlier in his career. But, what attracted Zurrer, he said, was the artist’s shrewd approach to building a dedicated, participatory audience for his work. He did so by making his art a game. 

“When I first started looking at NFTs, I spent a long time just figuring out who the players were,” Spratt told ARTnews. “The auctions were like stories in themselves, I could see people’s friends bidding, almost ceremonially, to give the auction some energy, and then other people would come in, and it would get competitive, emotional.”

Spratt released his first three NFTs on the platform SuperRare in October 2021. The sale of those works, the first from his series LUCI, was accompanied by a giveaway of a free NFT to every person who put in a bid. Zurrer had been one of those underbidders (for the work Birth of Luci). While Spratt said the derivative NFTs were basically worthless, he wanted to give something back to each bidder. Zurrer, and others it seems, appreciated the gesture and Spratt quickly gained a following in the Web3 space. The offerings he gave, called Skulls of Luci, became Sam’s dedicated collectors that now go by The Council of Luci. 47 editions were given out and Spratt held back three.

All the works from LUCI are on view at the Docks Cantiere Cucchini, a short walk from the Arsenale, past a rocking boat that doubles as a fruit and vegetable market and over a wooden bridge. Though NFTs typically bring to mind glitching screens and monkey cartoons (ala Bored Ape Yacht Club), the ten works on view depict apes in a detailed, painterly style and emit a soft glow. Taking cues from photography installations, 1OF1 ditched screens in favor of prints mounted on lightboxes. 

 “We don’t want it to look like a Best Buy in here,” said Zurrer.

Each work represents a chapter in a fantasy world that Spratt dreamed up. Though there’s no book of lore to refer to, there seems to be some Planet of the Apes story at play in which an intelligent ape lives alongside humans, babies, and ape-human hybrids. Spratt received an education in oil painting at Savannah College of Art and Design and he credits that technical training with his ability to bring warmth and detail to the digital works. He and the team often say that his art historical references harken to Renaissance and Baroque art, though the aesthetics—to my eye—seem to pull from commercial illustration and concept art. That isn’t too surprising given that this was the environment that Spratt started off in after graduating SCAD in 2010. 

“After school I was confronted with the reality that for a digital artist the only path was commercial,” Spratt said. 

He did quite well on that path, producing album covers for Childish Gambino, Janelle Monae, and Kid Cudi and bagging clients like Marvel, StreetEasy, and Netflix. Spratt also enjoys a huge audience of fans who have followed him as he’s migrated from Facebook to Tumblr to Twitter and Instagram, posting his hyper-realistic fan-art on each platform. Despite the apparent success, Spratt spoke of the work with bitterness. 

“I was a gun for hire. A mimic, hired to be 30% me and 70% someone else,” he said.

Spratt’s personal life blew up when he turned 30 and he traced some of the mistakes he made in his relationships with the fact that he had spent so much of his career “telling other people’s stories.” NFTs seemed like a way out of commercial illustration and a way into an original art practice. 

For his latest piece in the LUCI series, Spratt digitally painted a massive landscape set in this ape-human world titled The Monument Game. For the piece, Spratt initially sold NFTs that would turn 209 collectors into “players” (since another edition of 256 NFTs was given to the Council to “curate” new champions”). Each player would then be allowed to make an observation about the painting. The Council of Luci would vote on which three observations were best, and those three Players would receive one of the Skulls of Luci NFTs that Spratt held back. By creating these tiers of engagement, with his Council and player structure, Spratt pushes digital collectors to give the kind of care to his work that more traditional collectors do.

“Jeff Koons said that the average person looks at a work of art for twenty seconds,” Lukas Amacher, 1OF1’s Artistic Director and the curator of the show, told ARTnews. “Sam has found a way to get people to engage in his work for much longer.” 

The game Spratt has designed for the Venice exhibition might seem too gamified to fit the art world’s notion of art, but as Amacher and Zurrer suggest, in the Web3 environment, value is built by finding alternative ways to create investment and attention in what are typically immaterial digital artifacts. And it’s working. Thus far, the LUCI series has generated $2 million in primary sales and about $4 million in additional secondary volume. The challenge now, as it has been for the past three years, is to see if art’s gatekeepers will take this work seriously. 

At the presentation of The Monument Game in Venice, an observation deck, built by platform Nifty Gateway, sits in front of the mounted work. Participants can click on the painting on the screen and write down their observations of the work in front of them, no NFT required. The first observation came from star curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the former director of Castello di Rivoli and curator of Documenta 15: a tribute to art dealer Marian Goodman. The second was from Zurrer. Who’s next?

“Sam Spratt: The Monument Game” is on view until June 21 at the Docks Cantiere Pietro Cucchini in Venice.

When NFT.NYC was established in 2018, it brought together a tight-knit community of Web3 nerds. But, by 2021, it had exploded into a monster convention, with 1,500 speakers and a stacked calendar of parties bringing together art, tech, and finance types, often for the first time. At this year’s post-crypto crash edition, which ended Friday, the energy was more muted and the Web3’s various factions kept to themselves. The more entrepreneurially-minded Web3 types headed to New York’s Jacob Javits Convention Center, while those invested in NFT art, headed for their own venues.

During the opening speech of the convention, NFT.NYC co-founder Jodee Rich acknowledged the new reality, saying simply, “The speculative burn has passed.” 

Indeed it has. The convention center’s halls were quiet, crowds were thin to non-existent, and a pall hung over everything. The recurring theme of the proceedings? A pivot to merchandising and attempts to hook NFTs to its tech hype bubble replacement, artificial intelligence.

But why? Bitcoin reached an all time high last month at $73,800 and Ethereum, the blockchain most NFTs are sold on, has traded between $3,000-$3,900 over the last month (Ether’s all-time high of $4,721 was achieved during the 2021 boom). One would think there would be more excitement in the air after over a year in the so-called crypto-winter. These bumps in the market, however, haven’t brought about the headlining NFT prices that stunned the art world and launched a thousand startups in 2021. 

“I’m going to give you my positive spin but the data doesn’t look good,” David Pakman, managing director of the blockchain investment firm CoinFund, said during his keynote speech in front of a slide showing NFT trading volume. 

Pakman went on to argue—somewhat unconvincingly—that, while he sees crypto and NFT prices as linked, there is typically a couple month lag between the two. Then he noted that the majority of NFT trading had shifted from OpenSea–the behemoth NFT trading platform that was once crowned with a $13.3 billion valuation—to Blur, a zero-fee marketplace with tools meant for “mercenary traders” in Pakman’s words.

Getting rid of royalties for creators, Pakman went on, was “incredibly short-sighted.” One of the most valuable functions NFTs provided was ensuring that creators were paid royalties each time their NFT was sold. In late 2022 some platforms stopped honoring royalties in order to incentivize trading activity, and once one platform did, it became, as Pakman termed it, “a race to the bottom.”

There was some good news. In February, Yuga Labs, the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club, and crypto-wallet Magic Eden launched a new NFT platform to tackle the royalty issue. The platform, also named Magic Eden, established the Creator’s Alliance, which includes a number of top NFT projects and companies like ​​Yuga Labs, RTFKT, Pudgy Penguins, and Azuki who will only support marketplaces that support royalties. Whether that actually resolves the issue remains to be seen.

The most exciting development, according to Pakman and others at the convention: merchandising. Last fall, NFT collection Pudgy Penguins began selling toys based on its NFTs in Walmart. As of last month, when Walmart expanded the partnership, the toys had generated over $10 million. Panels throughout the day focused on merchandising, Mattel, and sports fans.

Another area of growth, according to Pakman, is AI. “Who’s gotten their check in the mail from OpenAI?” Pakman asked the crowd rhetorically, referring to the copious amounts of user-generated content and art used to train such platforms. His solution: mint everything as an NFT, in order to create a mechanism by which people could receive dividends when their content is used in AI training data sets. 

Though there weren’t any visible art world denizens at the convention center, many flew in to New York to reconnect at other events. Eric Calderon, the founder of Art Blocks, and generative artist Tyler Hobbes attended an Art Blocks-partnered event at the Museum of the Moving Image, while recently launched NFT Storage and tech platform IPFS held a night of talks at MoMA PS1 While the convention was a little demoralizing (although, when are they not?) the artists, institutional leaders, founders, and developers at the art-focused events seemed well-rested, even Zen, as they relished in the slower, more focused pace of this year’s gathering. 

“This has been my favorite edition so far,” Josh Yakov, founder of the recently-launched digital art podcast ParcPod, told ARTnews at the PS1 event. “It’s more serious. People are here to talk about infrastructure, art, important things.”

The talks at MoMA PS1 tackled the serious issue of building technologies and practices that will preserve NFTs. It was striking to compare the gender division at NFT.NYC to the PS1 event. The leaders from the companies that had supported the talks, including NFT Storage, IPFS, FileCoin, and Protocol Labs, were all women. At the Javits Center, it was hard to ignore that typically men appeared to outnumber women by around 20-to-1.

Regardless of where you were this week, the future was on everyone’s mind. At the Javitz Center, panelists and attendees talked about ways to sell NFTs to new audiences. At the art-focused events, the conversation revolved around creating a sustainable ecosystem that would allow for the preservation of and flourishing of digital art. 

But there are some who take a different approach. Artist Auriea Harvey, however, was simply focused on her own work. At the opening for her show, The Unanswered Question at Bitforms gallery on the Lower East Side, the pioneering net artist, who also has an excellent, not-to-be missed show at the Museum of the Moving Image, Harvey seemed unphased by the potential of a crypto upswing, which has in the past brought rare wealth to digital artists both high and low.

“[The 2021 bull market] gave everyone an excuse to pay attention. I’ve been here for 30 years,” Harvey told ARTnews. “This happens. Institutional support happens, it appears, it disappears. People talk about bull markets, bear markets, well, the same thing with attention, there are cycles. You can’t let it get to you. This too will be obsolete.”