#8: Do not pass go! Do not collect 200BTCs!
This week: Towards the Digital Art singularity | Monopoly goes Web 3 | Michelangelo's Art Lab | The state of culture ... and a special offer for this year's Beyond Conference.
Welcome back, fellow travellers.
This week we open with a new trend: the coming together of different digital art genres in what i’m calling the Digital Art Singularity.
As the newsletter grows, we’re starting to see ideas repeating over and over - developing, I hope, the beginnings of a coherent overview of contemporary digital creative practice.
Stay tuned over the coming weeks: I’m going to start indexing them in paid subscriber-only resource packs so you can see track these connections as they emerge.
Now, onto this weeks R&D goodness..
The Digital Art Singularity // Lumen Prize review
One result of the current collision of creativity with technology is an accelerating change in which the different and historically highly-fragmented strands of digital art are coalescing into a larger, more powerful whole.
I’m calling this the digital art singularity - and my bet is on two things:
That within the next decade we’ll become as comfortable talking about AI art or VR art as we’ve become talking about conceptual art or pop art since the wider genre and scene of Contemporary Art emerged in the 60s.
And critically that digital artists will become genuine global market drivers in sales value, in exhibition attendances and museum acquisitions. Bets on Refik Anadol - who I mention far too often - becoming one of the most valuable artists in the world in 2024 are already off.
If you’re still confused by the micro-disciplines of digital art, don’t worry, new forms and formats are still brewing - and will continue to do so. This typology of digital art in The Art Newspaper is super-helpful though - and it gets to 14 current variant strains. That’s five more already than in the definitive Digital Art written by Christiane Paul, the Whitney Museum curator we talked about in issue 3. The list might reach 20 next year.
But however micro the genres, as digital art becomes a singular scene, the Lumen Prize will remain a key way to navigate its qualities.
The Lumen Prize is an annual prize for digital arts founded in 2012 by Carla Rappaport. It just gave out its annual prizes - and the winners tell us a lot about how digital art is both fusing with other genres, and how its diverse micro-genres are becoming easier to understand as a singular whole.
Take its overall 2023 winner, “AUTO{}Construccion” by Mexican artists CNDSD and Ivan Abreu which is,
a live coded audiovisual concert using video game animations guided by algorithmic music.
The AV concert narrates with fictions of speculative architecture, the phenomenon of informal housing in countries like Mexico, the United States, Latin America, Asia, India and some European peripheries. We are interested in the ability of writing and live editing (coding) to enunciate, create and tell audiovisual stories in a liquid and granular way
This is rich and complex work, built on traditions of social investigation common across visual art, documentary film-making and more.
But those traditions are virtualised, twisted into new forms by the potentialities of current technologies to visualise the impossible and make new connections at an informational rather than surface textural level.
Or take “Human Unreadable'“ by American duo Generator. It won the tortuously titled Metaversal Generative Art Award, but depends ultimately on a piece of choreographed performance.
In each of these works, disciplines are collapsing into each other, and in each, it becomes easier just to call them their wider name: digital art.
The winners here are brilliant work, deserving of the widest audiences - the quicker the scene and ecosystem joins up to make them coherent as a global art scene of importance and stature, the better.
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New Digital IP: Monopoly goes Web 3
I talked in issue 7 about how major IP licenses would-likely increasingly define the future shape of Creative R&D innovation.
Well, the next example up is a pretty unlikely spin on that: a crypto-age (official licensed!) version of Monopoly. 😱
Bear with me, this will take a little explaining.
The game comes from the brilliant World of Women community (WOW), a group who fought for diverse representation in digital art as it risked being overwhelmed by “bro-ness” back at the peak of the NFT hype-cycle.
Their take on Monopoly - coming in a 17lb box at $249 - is wildly creative in about 100 directions at once.
You can play with different NFT-culture inspired collectibles - forget the Hat or the Iron of the old version, now you can play with your Crypto Punks or Bored Apes. And new gameplay elements derived from Web 3 ideas are loaded on - pay gas fees and Ether Bills rather than the old Utilities costs.
But most of all, the narrative-free Monopoly has had a part-mystical, part-comic story layered over the top, and a tonne of amazing artwork, that places the game in a future-time where WOW are saviours of the universe.
It is gloriously, geekily inventive.
Like the best of the NFT world, there’s a brilliant cultish obscurantism at play that’s executed with real wit, humour and passion.
And it may be a sign of a wider transition of NFT-culture out into the physical domain - just as this is happening, Crypto Punks, amongst the earliest NFT collectibles are are also being sold as one-time physical artworks.
Another trend to keep tracing.
The original Art Lab // Michelangelo’s Sketch Room
Note to self: One thing I’d love to do is trace the history of experimental spaces for artistic practice. Where did artists, writers, musicians just try things out? How did those spaces come about? What did they learn? What did they abandon?
If I ever get a chance to tell that story, this week’s opening of Michelangelo’s own “art lab” in Florence would be a key part of the story.
Opened to the public for the first time, and allowing just 100 visitors per week in until April next year, this is where Michelangelo “sequestered” (tr: hid!),
when the Medici family regained power in Florence in 1530, the Pope, who was a Medici family member, ordered for Michelangelo to be executed because of his participation in the revolt that led to the family’s exile in 1527 as well as his work for the city’s brief Republican government.
The walls, covered in half-finished sketches constitute a great monument to artistic experiment.
In the simplest terms: WOW!
At a point where the value of creative experimentation is becoming better understood and valued, to have such an important historic example suddenly appear has a beautiful resonance.
Read all about it in Hyperallergic.
(Mis)read of the week // The state of culture
And finally, another itch I need to scratch.
It’s a couple of weeks old now, but this article by Jason Farago in the New York Times still has me thinking.
TL;DR: The twenty-first century is a historic low-point for cultural innovation:
We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press
Is he right?
This is not the grumpy old guy take like legendary film critic David Thomson declaring the death of cinema back in 2014.
It’s subtler, and grounded in two ideas:
First that the modernist age that came before was a unique historical explosion of new-ness - which is totally true.
Second that with the digital age, “the digital tools we embraced were heralded as catalysts of cultural progress, but they produced such chronological confusion that progress itself made no sense”
It’s a deeply thoughtful take, and for anyone caught up in the swirl of innovation, a sharp, cold intake of breath worth taking.
But my response is: wait, we’re coming out of a period of creative transition where all the currents of contemporary innovation are starting to make sense.
Looking back I think we’ll see the period roughly of the first fifty years of micro-computing, the internet and global telecoms - the shaping technological forces of our contemporary age and which began all at once in the 1970s, as causes of a historical break-point.
They caused one way of doing culture, of doing art to come slowly - sometimes brilliantly - to an end.
I think about this a lot and the films of Paul Thomas Anderson.
Line him up against Scorcese, Kubrick, Hawks, Welles and in terms of pure artistic quality I think he’s better than any of them. Maybe only Bergman has made more great films.
But whilst Bergman shaped global film from the 50s to the 70s, PTA’s films have barely left a bruise on contemporary culture - they’re invisible, artefacts of a pre-digital age that birthed them but has already peaked then subsided, leaving them barely really meaning very much at all, however brilliant they are.
Alongside this, an alternative, ‘born digital’ way of producing culture has meanwhile been struggling to fully emerge.
I think - and this is really why i’m writing this newsletter - the people, places and projects that are birthing 21st century art and culture are really just gathering momentum now.
And I think as a result that Farago’s criticism is misplaced.
We’re only 23 years in to the 21st century.
I know this is WAAAY too big an idea to really handle here, but in simple terms all i’m saying is: keep watching, the fun is just beginning.
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