A painting of a shiny, digital-looking female figure posing on stage

Commentary

A New Realism

Increasingly, painters are using digital tools and computer-generated images to capture the tone and texture of reality.

An AI-generated image of a handsome man in a camel coat standing in front of a view of the Toronto skyline at sunset

Commentary

The Treachery of Images

Images have always tempted people to produce more of them. Generative AI ushers in the ultimate freedom of the image from human agency.

An AI-generated, abstracted human figure is posed in a similarly abstracted art studio

Commentary

Prompt Response

Is prompt engineering with generative AI a valid artistic practice? Mark Amerika’s Artificial Creative Intelligence debates critic Kevin Buist.

A digital image of a faded piece of paper with pale gray square patches, overlaid with lines of inky black asemic text

Commentary

Deconstruction to the Rescue

Critiques of large language models like ChatGPT rely on a logocentric metaphysics of presence—a worldview already debunked by poststructuralist theories of language.

A photograph of a camera that produces texts describing the pictures it takes as it prints the output

Commentary

Fictional Devices

Science fiction has been anticipating (and imagining) the death of the author for quite some time.

Illuminated with a projected animation, a building explodes with colorful fluid shapes

Commentary

The Digital NonMonument

Unobstrusive, ephemeral, embedded in rhythms of everyday life—digital art is finding felicitous ways to migrate from personal screens to public space that bypass the museum.

A glowing blue triangle floating in a black field bears the text "From the first yes, a hundred more"

Commentary

Six Perspectives on Decentralized Curation

How is the web3 principle of decentralization changing the way art is funded, produced, collected, and displayed?

A diagram comparing eras of the internet, from early web forums to social media to web3 media collectives

Commentary

Holographic Media

Media is no longer linear. Legacy outlets fade into noise, and communities have become filters through which all platforms are accessed.

A book cover with the image of a globe and lines connecting nodes on it

Commentary

Fork Your Society, I want Out

Silicon Valley thought leader Balaji Srinivasan has proposed a revolutionary new form of statecraft, but it’s limited by metaphors of software development.

A person stands with arms outstretched in an arid desert landscape, appearing to wear a dress made from red and pink balloons

Commentary

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Digital garments have been heralded as a revolution for sustainability in the fashion industry. But are they mainly just a cash grab for big-name brands?

A booth at an art fair with backlit monitors on black walls showing colorful and striking abstract digital art.

Commentary

The Marketplace of Ideas

With startups and foundations exhibiting alongside galleries, Art Dubai Digital proposes another model for the art fair, and myriad possibilities for digital art’s place in culture.

A view of a virtual world, with three stand-alone columns serving as portals to social areas. They stand around a blue pool opposite red trees

Commentary

Five Views of the Metaverse

What is the metaverse and where is it headed? Five artists and builders share their perspectives.

A digital rendering of a circular hall with a central column adorned by the Liberland flag

Commentary

Land of the Free Market

Zaha Hadid Architects is building a libertarian metaverse whose vision of the future looks remarkably similar to our current reality.

Commentary

2022 in Review: NFTs and the Art World

How are attitudes toward NFTs changing in the art world? Seven professionals share their perspectives.

Commentary

For The Record

Arcual is the latest venture to promise that its blockchain technology will transform the art world, but thorny questions remain.

Commentary

Artist-Centered Cybersecurity

NFT artists have to be constantly alert to the threat of scams and hacks. How can cybersecurity approaches be adjusted to protect the most vulnerable?

What used to be a photo of a woman, distorted beyond recognition

Commentary

What’s in a Name?

Given the importance of privacy to the culture of crypto, pseudonyms abound on the NFT market. But value and identity are still inextricably tied together.

Commentary

Blockchain Vitalism

Artistic experiments with blockchain that treat code outputs as living things suggest a radical recalibration of agency, pointing the way toward alternative systems of social organization.

Commentary

NFTs in the Ivory Tower

A conference at Oxford brought together experts from art, business, and technology, attempting to define the field of NFTs in broad strokes.

Commentary

From Dark Matter

The emergence of crypto art demonstrates what an art world without institutions can look like—even if it’s not the utopia some hoped for.

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Meaningful Returns

For activists frustrated with the pace of change in the physical world, NFTs are opening up new ways of thinking about the digital repatriation of looted African artifacts.

Commentary

The Trouble with DALL-E

Five thoughts on the use of artificial intelligence to accelerate the digital art market

Commentary

Bake Sale

When artists enter the NFT market from the world of museums and galleries, they often pledge big chunks of their proceeds to charity. Why?

Commentary

In Search of a Common Language

Participants at an NFT conference in Kassel had trouble communicating across disciplinary borders.

Commentary

One Small Step Backward for Man

Pace’s Discord gives eager crypto speculators a taste of the art world's harsh realities: they go to the moon, you stay here on Earth.

Commentary

Economic Provenance and the Audit Problem

How can expertise from time-based media art conservation help appraisers vet NFTs?

Commentary

Playing by Protocol

Nina is a web3 protocol that aims to change how independent music is sold.

Commentary

Digital Provenance and the Wallet Problem

The blockchain promises an immutable record of provenance, but the custodial wallets and shared contracts used by some marketplaces make it difficult to verify authorship, complicating the work of appraisers and historians.

Commentary

The Digital Combine

The metadata field of an NFT’s smart contract offers a new way for artists to suture elements of hybrid works.

Commentary

Behold the Rock

NFT projects depicting rocks remind us that, like rocks, NFTs could be helpful tools. Or they could be useless.

Commentary

Authentication in the Expanded Field

NFTs could be an improvement on the paper certificates used to authenticate reproducible artworks. But much work needs to be done to realize that potential.

Commentary

Timed Exposure

Two new initiatives are exploring the potential of NFTs not only to sell photography but also to build connections between its past and future.

Commentary

Perpetual Futures

The investment tools of decentralized finance are accelerating speculation’s spread to all aspects of life, irrevocably changing how we see the world and experience time.