Artwrld hosts live talks every week with leading artists, technologists, art professionals, and entrepreneurs about the opportunities and challenges at the vang...
Christie’s Nicole Sales Giles on Making History With the First AI Art Auction
If you're in the art and tech space—or the art world writ large—you've probably been at least a little transfixed by the drama, controversy, and, ultimately, financial success attached to the Christie's Augmented Art auction that ended last week.Some decried the sale, the first ever dedicated to art made with artificial intelligence, as glorifying what they see as mass exploitation of creative work by the big AI companies. In fact, after it was announced, approximately 6,500 people signed an open letter to Christie’s with a simple cri de coeur: “We ask that, if you have any respect for human artists, you cancel the auction.”Others have argued that the artists featured in the sale are doing exactly what we want artists to do: to experiment with new tools and ideas, break conventional boundaries, and push through to uncharted terrain. Heightening the stakes, perhaps? The auction's success, with its $730,000 haul coming in 20 percent above estimate, was a rare bright spot in an otherwise gloomy and perturbed art market. So let's talk about it! And let's hear the backstory from the person who organized it, Christie's Vice President of Digital Art Nicole Sales Giles. Because the work that went into the sale, both by the artists and the auction house, is actually more consequential—and more fascinating—than meets the eye.This week, I am very pleased to talk to Nicole about how she went about assembling Augmented Art, what AI art even means, and what the artists who protested the auction got absolutely right.
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1:10:15
Artist Stephanie Dinkins on How to Play the Long Ball With AI
Few things feel worse than being misunderstood. That’s especially the case when you’re persistently misunderstood—when, try as you might to convince someone of something you know to be true, it falls on deaf ears because their mind is already made up to the contrary.Now, imagine if the future of your reality was being constructed atop this misunderstanding, and if it wasn’t just you who was misunderstood but a vast population of other people like you.Years ago, the artist and professor Stephanie Dinkins realized this nightmare scenario was in fact playing out with AI, with foundation models being trained on data that replicates the same pernicious biases across race, gender, and other points of difference that contribute to making our society unequal and problematic.So, she resolved to do something about it.
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1:15:23
Metalabel's Yancey Strickler on Building a Post-Crypto Haven for Artists
A few years ago, the Kickstarter-cofounder and creative entrepreneur Yancey Strickler went down the crypto rabbit hole. In his brilliant 2019 essay “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” he had articulated his realization that the social web had become a hunting ground for extractive tech companies that preyed on your time, attention, privacy, agency, and money. If artists wanted to escape their clutches and build sustainable careers on their own terms, they needed to hide out in private forums—and the NFT space, with its tight-knit community and promise of decentralization, seemed to offer a safe haven in the scary thicket.So when he founded Metalabel in 2021 as a new kind of platform for creatives based on communal making, automated revenue splits, and friction-free social distribution, it seemed natural to build it on a crypto foundation. But soon a new realization dawned: there were dangers in the rabbit hole as well, with speculation and a drive toward profit maximization creating a casino environment that many artists found inhospitable.So, after going down the rabbit hole, Yancey went through the rabbit hole, and out the other side.
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1:05:53
Tom Emrich on How to Prepare for an Augmented Art World
Back in 2014, after Google Glass was released, the tech journalist and entrepreneur Tom Emrich wore that notoriously before-its-time AR device for nearly a year, trying to find ways to integrate it into his life. One day, a man who saw him sporting the wearable at a Tim Hortons in Toronto called him "the man from the future." Now, after a decade-long run in the mixed-reality field that involved selling a startup to Niantic and then leading AR product management there, Tom remains a man from the future—only that future, in which spatial computing transforms the way we experience the world around us, is now much, much closer. What that strange new paradigm will look like is the subject of Tom's new book, titled The Next Dimension: How to Use Augmented Reality for Business Growth in the Era of Spatial Computing. In it, he talks about where the technology is today, where it's going, and how to prepare for it.So how will spatial computing open new doors for artistic creation, for the art market, and for the art experience writ large? And, more to the point, how can the famously slow-moving art ecosystem position itself so it is ready for the arrival of sophisticated, mass-adopted wearables within the next half decade?
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1:13:51
NEW INC'S Salome Asega on Incubating Tomorrow's Art x Tech Superstars
With AI, blockchain, and augmented reality gradually but inexorably changing the nature of creative work, there has probably never been a time when planning one’s artistic career path has been more fraught with uncertainty. In a tough art market, old strategies are starting to look shopworn. Novel approaches are emerging, from reimagining the studio as a startup, as Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst have done with Spawning, to taking on venture capital as an alternative to working with galleries, as some top crypto artists are trying out.Confronted with this garden of forking paths, what should an ambitious, tech-leveraging artist do if they want to be successful?Enter Salome Asega. As the head of NEW INC, the New Museum of Contemporary Art's art x tech incubator, Salome is dedicated to helping the next generation of creatives shape their concepts and career strategies in this very strange moment. And, at a time when certain Silicon Valley incubators have taken a rightward turn, NEW INC tackles its work with a decidedly New York City ethos, leveraging strategies of diversity, equity, and inclusion not only as humanistic touchstones but also competitive advantages in the cutthroat marketplace of culture and ideas. If you want to see what the result of NEW INC’s approach looks like, consider that both Stephanie Dinkins and her Bina48 robot and the attention-hacking collective MSCHF were supercharged by the incubator.So, what kind of future art world is Salome building toward at NEW INC, and why is New York City the natural place for it to take root?In this episode, I sit down to talk to Salome about her fascinating, vital work.
Artwrld hosts live talks every week with leading artists, technologists, art professionals, and entrepreneurs about the opportunities and challenges at the vanguard of creativity.
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