To find out where museums might go from here, ArtReview asked several professionals close to institutions for a diagnosis
Museums function as authoritative spaces that disseminate values and legitimate specific artistic practices but also provide a context for the reassessment of works and interpretations, as public mores change. As a historian, having to continually reassert what counts as digital art can be frustrating. Are we discounting Leo Villareal’s code-based lightboxes? Jenny Holzer’s digital animation displays? What about the manipulated photographs of photographer Andreas Gursky? Are these not digital artworks? But digital art ‘today’ seems to mean a range of practices and technologies that have only just emerged, or else were historically marginal to canonical accounts of art but which have recently been recognised by the institutional artworld, among them works using, or deemed progenitors to, blockchain and AI. Many scholars emphasise that ‘AI’ is a marketing term, since it encompasses so many different types of algorithms, software stacks or hardwares that its application to art often obscures more than it illuminates about the work. At the same time, a certain amount of media hype made it seem that digital artists were embracing the canonisation that museums implied. The events of the last few years have confirmed many artists’ institutional critique of museum governance; similarly, there’s been a shift in practices and social contexts for art that has made museums awkward settings for these works and seems to have further relegated them to culturally conservative strongholds.
How, then, should the museum deal with the shifting and expanding reality of digital art? Let’s look at some art more obviously associated with contemporary technologies. The AARON works of Harold Cohen, from the 1970s, are considered early ‘AI’ works but used an algorithm and a plotter that did not depend on a corporate computational stack, and presents questions about the genres of still life or portraiture that are far more interesting than just emphasising its tech. Cohen’s work offers a lineage to the contemporary practice of Sougwen Chung, who makes paintings with her robot D.O.U.G. (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation X), and whose ephemeral performances with D.O.U.G. present a transmedia practice not easily subsumed under the concept of ‘digital’ art. Maya Man’s website takeover, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City (2024–25), was commissioned as part of the Whitney’s online-only On the Hour project, and made use of TikTok ‘day in my life’ reels but wasn’t tied into that social-media network. In contrast, many of the conceptually brilliant NFTs produced by Rhea Myers change in response to blockchain (network) activity. Other NFTs could enter a collection as an image or video object, with the NFT shifted into a cold wallet for storage, although their fragile software still requires particular conservation attention. Why are Villareal, Holzer and Gursky seen as ‘contemporary art’, and not drafted into the enclosure of digital art? Is it those works’ ability to obscure the technology that makes the difference? If so, that seems to ask art to hide its material conditions, which is counter to the espoused values of contemporary art’s social politics.
Being in a museum ensures that art is part of a historical record, preserving ideas for future rediscovery and debate. This is true regardless of whether digital art has the particular precarity of rapid technical obsolescence or algorithmic decay; some art that stems from computer processes doesn’t appear on a screen, like most assume of digital art. Nevertheless, when works do rely on corporate software components or networks that institutions cannot acquire or control, their long-term maintenance becomes uncertain. That problem alone can be daunting, making museums unable, or unwilling, to acquire them. And the challenges of collection management can also make museums beholden to private donors and corporate funders to support the ongoing preservation of a work. Because of that, museums can’t represent the only context for evaluating the significance of these practices, or an artist working with these types of technologies.
Many museums started from princely collections, making recent collectors’ interest in establishing their own institutions or donating personal collections reiterate that history. The emphasis on networked modality and circulation in the antiestablishment rhetoric of some artists and collectors has left me curious why museum acquisitions and exhibitions (let alone building new museums) remains important. I’ve wondered about finding other approaches to celebrating these art practices; hybrid work makes use of coworking spaces and global social clubs exemplify institutions responding to mobility. What if these collectors banded together with a suite of educational or social organisations to distribute and exhibit the works around the world? As art shifted off the wall and pedestal, museums changed their architectural designs to accommodate the growth in size, installation requirements and other features. With decreased access to private and governmental funding, museums face challenges. The question isn’t simply whether digital art needs museums, but whether museums might learn from these artists and their hybrid practices different ways of thinking about infrastructure.
Charlotte Kent is a writer and academic specialising in visual culture
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