The fourth Industrial revolution is transforming all the spheres of our life including entertainment, finance, healthcare, transportation, public services, and the art world is no exception. Despite the conservatism of the art market and its rigidity in absorbing innovations, new technologies such as Artificial intelligence (AI), Cloud digital ecosystems and platforms, Web3, Blockchain, Internet of things (IoT), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Metaverse, are becoming the essential instruments of the art world, providing it with the new opportunities in both art creation and art management. On the other hand, there are discussions among the art world professionals, about whether the effect of technology is sustainable or just a temporary “hype”.
Under the influence of technology, new mediums such as AI art, VR art, and NFTs emerged providing artists with new tools to explore and enrich their artistic practice. Technology intensified the globalization of the art world giving the artists opportunity to collaborate with colleagues from all over the world. For instance, the team of “the Renaissance dreams” project led by the AI artist Refik Anadol included technology and art professionals from the USA, Turkey, Italy, China. “Our staff is multicultural and multilingual, we have an incredible staff of different minds and competencies”, Refik Anadol said.
At the same time, technology-driven art became a significant sector of the global art market. For instance, the most exensivve sale of NFT (the Beeple "Everyday's: the First 5000 days") at Christie's auction for $69 million happened only in 2021. Nevertheless, NFT's share in the art market was already around 2-3% in 2022, which is significant in terms of the short period NFTs exist in the world and despite the crypto crash of 2022.
Many technological innovations are happening in the world, but do they all influence the art market? I would like to focus on the most significant technologies which affect both art creation and art management. In 2022 Gartner highlighted 25 key technologies which influence the world the most.
The hype cycle starts with the most mature technologies (e.g. Cloud Data Ecosystem and NFTs) and moves to the least adopted technologies, which could lead to a huge innovative leap in the future. The most relevant to the art market technologies in the list are NFT, Web3, Industrial Cloud Platforms, Metaverse and Generative Design AI. I would like to focus on Industrial Cloud Platforms as a key technology which changes the art management process and Generative Design AI technologies as the least developed technology now, which could lead to the creation of completely new forms of art in the future, thus, influence art creation and the essence of art itself.
Industrial Cloud Platforms
Industrial vertical cloud platforms encompass a blend of software, platform, and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), designed to offer tailored solutions for specific industries. These industry-specific solutions predominantly rely on public cloud services, empowering businesses within those sectors to efficiently handle workloads, facilitate agile transformations, and address various requirements such as business operations, data management, compliance, and more. In essence, cloud platforms serve as comprehensive IT solutions that assist companies with intricate structures in developing client-centric digital services in the most optimal manner possible.
What are the differences between an online art gallery and a cloud art platform? According to the ArtBasel and UBS Report 2022, the “platformization” effect means the reorganization of cultural work, practices, and creativity around platforms.
Firstly, an art platform transfers most of its operations in a digital form which implies online artworks display for the customers, fully digital sales and payments which allow collectors to choose, buy and get the painting delivered home in several clicks online. Also, from the perspective of back-end art management process organization an art cloud platform assumes digital customer relationship management systems (CRMs), digital data storage and advanced analytics and a fully digital sales pipeline. There are even art industry-specific solutions, such as ArtLogic, which can be used as a white-labelled cloud platform by various industry players (online galleries, art marketplaces, auction houses etc.). Current ArtLogic’s users include Victoria Miro gallery and the White Cube. The company provides end-to-end services to bring art business to the digital universe with tools to manage inventory, contacts, CRM, marketing and accounts, instruments for powerful offer creation, in-depth analytics, websites and online viewing room templates. The use of such platforms helps art companies to organize their non-core activities most effectively to focus on the creative part of their business.
Secondly, platforms aim to disintermediation through creating direct communications between art buyers and art dealers or even artists themselves, which might lead to wider product supply at lower prices because of the essential cost-efficiency of platform business models. The brightest case of this disintermediation is the world’s largest art marketplace Artsy which brings together on one platform more than “100 000 artists from 4 000 galleries, fairs, auction houses, and institutions across 190 countries”. Artsy, launched in 2009, has established a strong brand attracting leading participants of the global art world such as Gagosian, Victoria Miro, Jeff Koons, Musée d'Orsay etc. Artsy attracts an unprecedented number of customers every month – as of October 2022, Artsy’s monthly average user rate (MAU) was 3.1 million unique visitors, which is almost 10 times higher than in Tate Modern (318 thousand monthly visitors) and the National Gallery (380 thousand monthly visitors), and 30 times higher than Pace Gallery’s website MAU.
Is the effect of industrial cloud platforms on the Art Market significant? The total share of online sales in the global art market reached 20% in 2021 with a growth in volume by 7% relative to 2020, which is relatively higher than in global retail in general (19%), speaking of year-to-year online sales share change in the art market, there is a decrease of 5% in 2021 meaning that the total growth of the global art market in 2021 (26%) exceeds the growth rate in the online segment. These figures might be interpreted as the post-pandemic recovery of physical art sales channels, but the trend of the art world going digital appears to be sustainable. Moreover, the share of digital-only art business reached 35% in 2020, according to Artsy Gallery Insights 2021 Report. In 2021, Christie’s acquired 64% of new customers through online sales. Nevertheless, there is no significant change in current collectors’ taste due to technological innovations – there is still rising demand for established Impressionist and twentieth-century artists and a decline in Old Masters painting sales.
The rise of art cloud platforms influences all the participants of the art market making art more affordable and aligned with the new wave of younger collectors who generally prefer digital channels. The rise in price transparency in the art market helps to build trust with the collectors and makes Art a better investment asset. For the artists’ and galleries’ sake, digital art platforms help them to reach new customers and markets from all over the world introducing local artists to a wider audience and creating a cost-efficient business model, which requires less or no investment in physical spaces. However, Cloud Art Platforms have limitations in terms of the creation of a strong visual impression with the artwork through a computer or a phone screen. Also, the lack of curatorial support on the marketplaces sometimes makes it difficult to choose an artwork among thousands of paintings and objects listed online. Further advancements in VR technologies could help online art businesses to create a truly immersive experience in the future. AI and ML predictive models could help to create “smart” artwork search engines to personify an offer for an individual collector based on one’s taste, the similar mechanics used by Netflix. The advanced AI models could even subsequently partly substitute the role of curator and art advisor on online art platforms.
Generative AI art
The development of AI technology is the main driver of the Fourth technology revolution, and today the art world is highly affected by its implications. While casual AI technology mostly affects the art management processes and leads to exceptional customer experience and art business efficiency, generative design AI could drastically disrupt the essence of art itself.
The interplay between technology and art has been evident since the era of Leonardo da Vinci. This pioneering polymath revolutionised European painting by incorporating scientific insights, such as the depiction of anatomically accurate human figures, the exploration of aerial perspective, the utilisation of chiaroscuro (the contrast between light and dark), and the application of sfumato (the subtle blending of colours). Many of these innovations were made possible by the technological invention of that time, namely the camera obscura.
To bring more transparency into the subject of generative AI art, it is important to clarify the definition of Generative Art. Introduced by the German philosopher Max Bense in 1965, the term “generative art” encompasses artworks created through algorithmic code or mathematical formulas. This art form is generated by a series of rules that automate the output, often incorporating elements of randomness within the algorithm. The process is guided by the artist, resulting in a collaborative endeavor between the artist and the machine, yielding the final artistic output.
In other words, an AI-generated painting is created by a computer via specific software (e.g. DALL-E, Midjourney, LAION-5B), through machine learning algorithms learning on “image-text” pairs taken from the Internet or custom made data sets. Thus, every image existing on the Internet can become a part of a data set used for the creation of AI paintings, including digital images of paintings by living artists who might find this a violation of artists’ rights and so-called “high-tech plagiarism”.
Last year, Jason Allen’s AI-generated work, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial”, took first place in the digital category at the Colorado State Fair. The artist had no artistic background and created his digital painting via Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program that turns text into hyper-realistic graphics. The fact itself picked the interest in active public discussion of the key issue in AI-art discourse whether the AI-generated work created with no or little human involvement be considered Art.
Jason M.Allen, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial”, 2022
There is no unified approach in art history and art theory on what should be considered art. According to Laurie Adams, on one hand, art is any object or image that is so defined by its maker («supply approach») and, on the other hand, Art can also be an object, or an image not explicitly identified as such, but which strikes the observer as expressive or aesthetically pleasing («demand approach»). According to both approaches, Jason Allen’s artwork is an art and has both commercial and aesthetic value. Besides, it could be considered as an example of metamodernism in art, a cutting-edge concept developed by T.Vermeulen and R.Van den Akker. “The metamodern artwork is expressed itself using neoromanticism and redirects the modern piece by drawing attention to what it cannot present in its language, what it cannot signify in its terms (that what is often called the sublime, the uncanny, the ethereal, the mysterious, and so forth”. In more general terms, Jason Allen’s AI artwork is an image produced by a non-human mind with aesthetic intent and could be assumed as artwork.
AI-generated art has also been already “legitimized” by auction houses. In October 2018, 2.5 years before the first NFT sale, Christie’s sold a portrait painting of Edmund de Belamy, generated with the machine learning algorithm CAN, for $432, 000.
Obvious, Portrait of Edmond Belamy created by GAN (Generative Adversarial Network), 2018.
The painting was created by Obvious, a Paris-based collective consisting of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier. According to Christie’s specialist Richard Lloyd, the market accepts this kind of artwork since “it is a portrait, after all. It may not have been painted by a man in a powdered wig, but it is exactly the kind of artwork we have been selling for 250 years”. The team who created the Belamy portrait believe that the artist is not just the one who physically creates the artwork, but the one that has the will to share the vision and send the message to the public. According to Ahmed Elgammal, director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab at Rutgers University, “If you consider the whole process, then what you have is something more like conceptual art than traditional painting. There is a human in the loop, asking questions, and the machine is giving answers. That whole thing is the art, not just the picture that comes out at the end. You could say that at this point it is a collaboration between two artists — one human, one a machine. And that leads me to think about the future in which AI will become a new medium for art”. The human artist statement to explore in the Edmund the Bellamy case is mainly the role of machines in art creation and the ability of algorithms to emulate creativity.
AI artist Refik Anadol is another bright example of creating unique immersive audio-visual experiences using AI technology as a new medium. Unlike Jason Allen, Refik Anadol is a professional artist who holds a Bachelor's and Master of Fine Art degrees from Bilgi University. Refik Anadol creates site-specific audio-visual artworks, where an architectural space takes the role of a canvas, accompanied by an immersive music experience. The artist focuses on the research of human-machine interaction in the modern world. In the WDCH Dreams project (2021) Refik in collaboration with The Los Angeles Philharmonic has developed a unique machine intelligence approach to the LA Phil digital archives to create impressive visualizations to celebrate the history and explore the future of the music institute. A project has been exhibited as a week-long public art installation projected onto the building’s exterior surface and a season-long immersive exhibition inside the Ira Gershwin Gallery.
Refik Anadol, “WDCH Dreams, 2019
Undoubtedly, Refik Anadol’s works possess all the key economic characteristics of artwork as a product:
- The work of art is unique, and original and is a result of creative work.
- The incentive to innovate is researching human-machine interactions rather than a financial one. 3.The valorization of the product requires an extensive team –Refik Anadol’s studio team for the WDCH dreams project included 10 people and 13 individuals and organizations who contribute to bringing the artwork to the public.
Considering different aspects of technology implications on the art world, all in all, it has generally positive effects through giving the artists extraordinary tools to empower creativity and make a statement on the most cutting-edge topics of society, and providing art managers with instruments to increase efficiency and broaden the edges of the current art market in terms of new products, channels, and customers.
Will technology be able to substitute a human in the art creation process meaning the death of art essence? Probably not, but undoubtfully, the art world is in dire need of further discussions of ethics and law aspects of technology to make the future of ArtTech sustainable.
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