Artwrld

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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