How Venture Capitalist Ryan Zurrer Is Fueling a Digital Art Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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