According to a recent survey conducted among museum directors across the United States by American Alliance of Museums in June 2020, a third of the respondents said either there was a “significant risk” that their museums would close permanently in the next 16 months or they “didn’t know” if they would survive the pandemic. Almost 90% have 18 months or less of financial reserves remaining, but 56% have just 6 months or less remaining.

Last October was something of a watershed moment for contemporary generative art with the first sale by auction of a portrait generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) for $432,500, titled “Portrait of Edmond Belamy.” The event garnered a huge level of public interest and received widespread media coverage across several major outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Miami Herald, and from leading online Art news platforms Artsy and Artnet, among others. …

In a world where social distancing is the new norm, art trade professionals are exploring, discussing, reconsidering and re-evaluating the value and potential of online offerings from a fresh perspective.

Just as many businesses are reckoning with the long-term implications of the sudden shift en masse to remote work precipitated by the current crisis, many in the art world are wondering what virtual art fairs portend for the post-COVID-19 art world. …

Back in 2014, Carter Cleveland, founder of Artsy.net, an online resource for art education and collecting, made 6 bold predictions about the future of art. Among them was a prediction that the art market would expand massively in the future. The rationale for his optimism was twofold. Firstly, he pointed to a great, untapped potential on the demand side of the market: for every household that collects art, there are 37 with the same average income who don’t. …

With the advent of new digital art forms and new ways to experience art digitally such as virtual art spaces, ideas about how we value art and how we signal our love of art are dramatically changing. Technological innovation isn’t simply changing how art is created, presented, distributed and sold; it is fundamentally redefining how we experience and appreciate the beauty and meaning of the works we fall in love with.

Digital Art and the Value of Scarcity

During a lively panel discussion this past June, courtesy of Christie’s 2019 Art + Tech Summit opportunely titled “the A.I. Revolution”, Kelani Nichole, founder of TRANSFER Gallery, had this…

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have been around for longer than many of us might think. The pioneers of VR technologies can be traced back as far as the Victorian era. In recent times, VR advocates most often cite gaming as the sector they believe is most applicable to these exciting technologies and the sector they expect to attract the most VR-related investment, according to the Perkins Cole Augmented and Virtual Reality survey results for both 2018 and 2019.

The Victorian-era pioneers of VR technologies were concerned with a very different problem, however. As Tom Standage and Seth Stevenson describe in…

The quest for new customers is a fundamental and ongoing endeavor for many private businesses in any marketplace. In the art market’s case, the 2019 Art Basel report cited the issue of finding new buyers as the biggest challenge facing art dealers last year.

In order to tackle this challenge, art dealers should be in tune with the demographic changes affecting the art market in recent years. As the market has globalized and digitized, the age profile of aspiring art collectors has been trending younger, and the traditional dominance of the male collector is waning.

Millennials are now the fastest-growing…