Module IV·Article III·~3 min read
Contemporary Digital and Global Art
Contemporary Art
Turn this article into a podcast
Pick voices, format, length — AI generates the audio
Deglobalization and Multipolarity of Art
The late 20th and early 21st centuries shift the center of global art from New York and London to everywhere. Artists from China, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Iran create works that are exhibited at the Venice Biennale, sold at Christie's, and become part of the permanent collections of the largest museums. Art has indeed become global—but this raises questions: on whose terms? Who sets the rules of the market? Who writes history?
Postcolonial Art
Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, Yinka Shonibare, Cai Guo-Qiang—artists working with the history of colonialism, race, identity. Kara Walker (1969) creates massive silhouette frescoes about slavery in the USA. Yinka Shonibare (1962) dresses historical figures in "dashiki" fabric—which seems "African," but is actually produced in the Netherlands and sold to Africa as a colonial commodity. This is double irony: "authenticity" is a construct.
Cai Guo-Qiang (1957) works with gunpowder and fireworks. "The Worm Project" (2003)—gunpowder explosions along the Great Wall of China. The millennia-old symbol of China's isolation is "opened" through an explosion. His "Event Horizon"—sculptures of falling figures on the facades of London buildings. This visualizes the global economic migration crisis.
Street Art: Gallery on the Street
Banksy is an anonymous British artist whose works appear on the walls of London, New York, Israel, Denmark. His images are politically charged: a soldier with a flower, a rat with a megaphone, a girl with a balloon. He mocks the art market ("Girl with Balloon" was sold at auction and immediately partially self-destructed—the price doubled).
Street art has transformed from vandalism into a recognized artistic genre. Brazilian artists Os Gemeos, American Faith Ringgold, Russian Pokras Lampas—all work in public space. This is the democratization of art: museum walls are removed, ticket prices disappear.
Digital Art and NFT
Digital art has existed since the 1960s. Harold Cohen created the AARON program, which generated drawings. Today neural networks create images indistinguishable from photographs. Where is the artist here?
In 2021, artist Beeple (Michael Winkelmann) sold an NFT (non-fungible token)—a digital certificate of authenticity—for $69 million at Christie's. A collage of 5000 digital images became the most expensive digital artwork ever. NFT solves the problem of "copyability" of digital works: now there is an original.
This sparks debate: what is being sold—the certificate, or the image itself? Anyone can download Beeple's image—but only one buyer owns the NFT. It's roughly like "owning" the original "Mona Lisa," knowing that billions of reproductions exist. The value lies in the certificate, in status, in "authenticity."
Artificial Intelligence as an Artist
DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion—systems generating images from textual description. They are trained on billions of human-made images. Who is the author of the generated image—the program, its creator, or the artist whose works were included in the training dataset without permission?
In 2022, Jason Allen won an art contest in Colorado with an image created using Midjourney. A scandal erupted: "artists" versus "AI users." But the question is more complex: artists have always relied on images of others, learned from masters of the past. The difference is in degree, not in principle.
The Museum in the 21st Century
The "white cube"—a gallery with white walls, neutral light, silence—became the standard of the 20th century. Now it is attacked from all sides: immersive exhibitions ("Rain" by Raul de la Cueva, teamLab projects), installation-exhibitions in unconventional spaces, total audiovisual projects.
teamLab Borderless in Tokyo is an example: digital projections fill the entire space, move, react to viewers' movement. This is the complete opposite of "contemplating a masterpiece": here, the viewer is inside the artwork. In a year—2 million visitors, most under the age of 30.
Question for reflection: Generative AI creates images in seconds. What will this change in your industry? Which professions will disappear, which will transform, and which will become more valuable?
§ Act · what next