Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Christiane Paul. Courtesy Christiane Paul.
The Baer Faxt: What challenges are art institutions currently facing in evaluating, collecting and displaying the current state of digital art forms such as AI, crypto art, and generative art?
Christiane Paul: The relationship between digital art and mainstream art institutions has been an uneasy one for many decades, and only in the twenty-first century has the art form become more integrated into institutional contexts. Generative and AI art have a decades-long history and crypto art has existed since the early 2010s, but their current manifestations cast a new light on the questions surrounding their evaluation, collection, and display.
Evaluating any form of digital art requires a deep understanding of its aesthetics and of art-historical developments relating to technological art forms and their exhibition histories. Generative software art, in which the artist codes instructions that can function autonomously and create a work of art within the programmed rule system, is one of the earliest forms of digital art. It has evolved from the early experiments of the so-called “Algorists”—the pioneering artists of the 1960s who coded generative software that was output as plotter drawings —to generative software art shown on screens or in immersive environments, all of which must be understood in historical context. The evaluation of NFT art (or crypto art) can be particularly taxing since sophisticated, generative works using the blockchain as medium exist in the same space as illustrations or overvalued collectibles consisting of jpegs “hung” on the blockchain by means of a smart contract. Artistic concept and use of the blockchain as medium are key to assessing the aesthetic value of work in the crypto space. Today’s AI art arguably poses the most significant challenges to evaluation. Artists have been working with artificial intelligence in sophisticated ways for decades, often writing their own software, but today’s text-to-image models allow for the instant creation of visuals by means of text prompts. To assess the aesthetics of AI art using the current tools one needs to pay attention to the critical, conceptual, and structural ways in which artists are using these technologies. AI art raises interesting questions about authorship and creative agency that artists have been addressing through deep engagement with the technology.
Nancy Baker Cahill, screenshot of CENTO, 2023. Commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.
While art institutions have been collecting different forms of digital art for decades, solid standards, protocols, and best practices have been established only more recently. A key element of collecting digital art is to identify a work’s acquisition components and all the media, materials, and technical specifications involved, for example commercial or open-source software, custom software etc. Storing multiple copies of acquired software art on the institution’s servers and hard drives has become standard practice. One of the big challenges for collecting current generative, AI, and crypto art is that they increasingly involve third-party dependencies; that is, corporate software components—from AI models to data sources or networks—necessary to keep other elements of the work functional. An artist may have created an extension for the corporate text-to-image tool used in their AI artwork, but an art institution wouldn’t be able to acquire the corporate tool itself. NFTs pose their own set of challenges that range from integrating institutional hot and cold wallets into existing procedures to gathering copies of the actual work and complementing the information included in smart contracts. NFTs per se are a digital version of a traditional certificate of authenticity and, in most cases, just link to the image or artwork in question, a copy of which needs to be stored on a museum server or hard drive. On-chain generative art also requires obtaining separate copies. Given that the smart contracts associated with NFTs are less sophisticated than the paperwork traditionally accompanying an artwork’s institutional acquisition additional information needs to be obtained.
Rachel Rossin, still from THE MAW OF, 2022. Co-commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and KW, Berlin. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art and KW, Berlin.
While digital art has increasingly been integrated into museums and their institutional structures, it still is not adequately represented in thematic or monographic exhibitions or permanent collections. The core challenges of displaying digital art have not changed much over the decades: the art form requires technical infrastructure and expertise, as well as often costly equipment and in-gallery staff, and art institutions do not necessarily have the appropriate resources. Displaying digital art also involves curatorial expertise: it entails a process of interfacing the digital that relates not only to delivery mechanisms but also to exchanges between the artwork and audience. An exhibition environment needs to support the real-time, generative, interactive, process-oriented and performative features of digital art. Interaction often proves to be a hurdle since it is based on a certain familiarity with interfaces and the understanding of response as a medium. As the youngest of current digital art forms, NFT art is the most challenging to display in traditional galleries since it becomes isolated from the social and market environment that is crucial to its identity.
