A collage of works from Ash Thorp’s ‘Nascent’ series (2022)

California-based Ash Thorp is a digital artist who creates complex, conceptual artworks. LUX met him recently at a solo show of his works on the giant screens of the W1 Curates space in Soho, London, during the Frieze Art Fair, an exhibition supported by uber-creative super luxury watch brand Richard Mille. We caught up with him in his studio in San Diego, southern California, to speak about past projects, future plans, and the tide of digital art.

LUX: You first started with traditional art and then transferred into digital art. Does digital art creates more of a dialogue between the art and viewer than traditional art?
Ash Thorp: All forms of art serve diverse purposes and employ their own unique mechanisms to engage viewers. For me, the key distinction with the dialogue digital art creates is its symbiotic relationship with the advancement of humanity. Technology plays a pivotal role in shaping our world in this current era and digital art is intricately linked to it. It mirrors the current state of our society and reflects our ongoing transformation as a species. This connection introduces multifaceted levels of engagement, contributing utility and value, not just to the artist but also to the audience.

LUX: You have mentioned a 80/20 rule in our discussions about your art.  Can you elaborate this?
AT: I strive to supply 80% of the context and intention of the artwork, and then invite you, the viewer, to extrapolate and complete the remaining 20% based on your own narration. The hope of this artistic intention is to prompt you to apply your own personal values, make predictions, form estimations, and view the piece through your unique lens. My role is merely to provide an initial platform upon which you can create further dialogue. I believe that art is most potent when it transforms into a conversation between the creator’s intent and the viewer’s interpretation by provoking questions, stimulating thoughts, and evoking emotions.

I welcome and value this engagement with my work, urging viewers to explore further and contemplate the underlying themes and ideas that elicit their thoughts and feelings.

The Happiness Pills from Thorp’s ‘Nascent’ Series’

LUX: Is training in traditional art fundamental to the practice of digital art?
AT: I believe in order to develop a profound understanding of any chosen pursuit, it is important to understand its origin and then dedicate yourself to its further exploration. This journey of self-discovery involves understanding one’s place in the artistic landscape, appreciating the work of those who came before, and gaining insights into how they expressed themselves. My early exposure to the traditional fundamentals of art during my formative years provided invaluable insights into the development of my current artistic practice. Absorbing as much knowledge as possible from all pathways will help cultivate a diverse and enriched mind, thereby benefitting both the individual and the broader world.

LUX: AI is, of course, the buzz topic of the current moment. How do you think it will shape our view of digital art?
AT: The ever-present allure of being introduced to anything new and technologically significant is a phenomenon that can be very captivating; in the realm of art currently, this is the integration of AI. While AI can provide an alluring spectrum of possibilities, allowing it to assume a dominant role in the creative process doesn’t evoke the same intrinsic value for me. I believe the essence of artistry is found in the triumphs and pitfalls, of creating it, and being able to experience the pure joy and raw emotions resulting from personal exploration and discovery.

Balaclava by Ash Thorp from the ‘Nascent’ series

LUX: Do you feel that the AI-employed art is still yours?
AT: The ethical considerations surrounding the use of AI, particularly in generating content, hinge on the specifics of the training model and the group of data utilized. Before AI, plagiarism was more easily tracked back to a distinct source and straightforwardly deemed a transgression in any form of communication. Now we seem to be entering a new era without transparency and a range of polarizing answers to this question. The implications of this ongoing debate will profoundly change the art industry and the world. Ultimately, our actions should not deprive oneself or others of an authentic mind and voice.

LUX: In terms of collecting and selling, how will new concepts such as crypto art, blockchain and NFTs change finances in the art world?
AT: The value of art has always been subjective, based on its own unique currency determined by those who acknowledge and collect it, but not always made public. Blockchain and NFT technology facilitate an evolution of this valuation process by transparently enhancing the public tracking of changes in ownership and value. Works of the past involve an extensive review process to determine proprietorship and authenticity which can now be more easily verified with technology.

LUX: You recently featured at Frieze London collaborating with W1 Curates, Seth Troxler and Richard Mille. How did you find the collaboration and do you enjoy digital art’s interdisciplinary possibilities?
AT: Showcasing an art exhibition during Frieze London was a monumental and wonderful experience. I greatly enjoyed working with everyone at W1 Curates and being introduced to Seth Troxler and the team at Richard Mille. Bridging the relationship across multiple industries through art created such a profound moment which everyone celebrated and commemorated together. This blending of media should hopefully inspire others to continue to follow suit with future collaborations and more venues, as it truly creates a surreal magical experience.

LUX: You have a particular interest in cars. What inspires you about them?
AT: My fascination with cars is a childhood passion that has endured time. The love of cars encapsulates so many aspects I cherish in life: the intricate design, precise engineering, scientific underpinnings, technological marvels, and the connection between humans and machines. I don’t merely see cars as vehicles of transportation. I enjoy the mental retreat to a space of childlike innocence, and perceive the deep-rooted romance within them.

Following by Ash Thorp from the ‘Nascent’ series

LUX: How has your digital art changed over time?

AT: Previously my work was primarily recognized on feature films like the Batman, but now I’m also able to showcase the more personal evolution of my digital art with blockchain technology. I’ve found the opportunity to delve deeply into a personal journey of my thoughts and curiosities. It’s a transformative journey that has significantly shaped both my perspective and my artistic endeavors, granting me the sovereignty to explore.

LUX: What are your upcoming projects and where do you see your art heading?
AT: I’m currently engaged in several exciting projects that cannot be disclosed just yet until their public release. As for the direction of my art, my overarching objective is to continue self-discovery, to understand further why I create this work, and to recurrently explore the fundamental answers to life.

We’re talking over Zoom and email. Though technology facilitates our distanced conversation – San Diego to London – in my opinion, it is less personal than an in person meeting. Are there areas of digital art which, relying on technology rather than the body or physical tools, make the relationship to the artist less personal? If so, does it matter?
Art curation is necessary and often overlooked in the digital space, primarily due to the convenience of technology.  Traditional works often demand a dedicated physical visit to a specific gallery or institution, which assists a narrative that it must be of higher value and experience. The challenge for digital art lies in finding opportunities for it be equitably appreciated and valued, for it to be seen to enhance our lives as much as any other form of art.

Find out more: www.altcinc.com

Part of a VR series that Beeple released for free public use. Courtesy of W1 Curates

Mike Winklemann, AKA Beeple, shot to fame after his digital artwork EVERYDAY: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS became the first ever purely non-fungible-token (NFT) to be sold at Christie’s, and was auctioned off for just shy of 70 million dollars in cryptocurrency. Darius Sanai spoke to the artist at his solo show at W1 Curates in Oxford Street, London

LUX: There is a lot of societal commentary in your digital artwork. Do you set out to do that, or is it something that develops?
Mike Winkelmann (Beeple): I guess I set out to do it. Im trying to predict things that are going to be issues in the future, or trends that I see developing now. This piece is talking about Natanz. Basically, the US didn’t confirm this, but it was speculated that they blew up the Iranian nuclear reactor. This is talking about how, in the future, I think there’s going to be  more warfare like that where they get into a computer system and f*ck some sh*t up.

If this is the first instance of a computer programme being used to physically blow things up, I don’t think it will be the last. I think it will happen more and more. It’s terrorists getting into a computer system to blow up an electrical plant. I think more things like that will happen.

Follow LUX on Instagram: luxthemagazine

LUX: Can you tell me about your ‘Everydays’ piece?
B: These are ‘Everydays’ in motion, where I made a picture each day and then occasionally I’d think it might be interesting if I animated it. I would take maybe 3 or 4 days and animate a little 15-second scene of that picture. This was a picture of when Trump locked himself in the White House. This was when Elon [Musk] had his baby, and named it X Æ A-12.

Some of them are not specifically about something. That one was during coronavirus when people started talking about killer hornets. This is just some weird Michael Jackson meme. And so on.

LUX: When you started back in the 2000s did you consider yourself a graphic designer, an artist, a filmmaker, or something else?
B: I considered what I was making to be art, just regular art, no different from anybody else. I was just using a different medium. But I considered myself a designer, because the way I made money was through solving visual problems for people. People were asking for concert visuals for Lady Gaga, or concert visuals for the Superbowl. So I’d take the brief of XYZ and say “okay, I’ll do that.”

LUX: So, it’s a practical application?
B: I know the tools; I can build you whatever you want. You tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I did it for money and that was it, while I put most of my real energy into work where I could do whatever I wanted.

The more of this work that I put out there for free, the better I got, until clients like Louis Vuitton were contacting me. It was really like I was a designer by day and also carving away a large amount of time to do my own work, that I wasn’t trying to sell, there was no concept of people collecting it. Art is just something you make and put online and people experience it and that’s it, and it was quite a shift when people began to start collecting it. That was just not a part of the way I thought about art.

Panel talk with Beeple (Mike Winkelmann), Nick Knight from Showstudio and Mark Dale from W1Curates. Courtesy of W1 Curates

LUX: What enabled these to become collector pieces?
B: The NFTs. The NFT thing, which took a lot of people coming up to me and saying, I think you should check this out. At first, I wasn’t sure, I thought it was just weird crypto sh*t, not my thing. Then finally it clicked and I thought, wait a second, this could be the same as moments in the past where people have refused to believe something was art. Photography, that’s not art, it’s just people taking photos. Graffiti, that’s not art, it’s vandalism, how could it be art? Then everyone says “oh wait! I guess it’s art.”

I think that’s what is about to happen with digital art. At the moment it’s this thing that everybody knows and everybody sees all the time and is actually completely ubiquitous in the visual language of our society. It’s websites, it’s voices, it’s TV, it’s video games, everything you see is visual. Art has touched it, but it’s not capital A art, because until recently, there wasn’t a meaningful way to collect it. You could print it out, you could give somebody a thumb drive, but that didn’t really resonate with people until the NFT thing. The ability to prove ownership resonated with people.

LUX: Is there a tension between the traditional capital A art world and the world of digital art?
B: 100%, yes. I think people in the digital world think that because we had the sale at Christie, we’re part of the art world now. In reality, there’s a lot of people still calling bullsh*t on us; we’ve got a long way to go to convince everybody that we’re the real deal.

It’s come a long way in 2 years, I will say that, much faster than I thought. A couple of years ago I would have believed it would have taken us 10 years to get to where we are now. It’s a matter of waiting for it to click for people that the stuff they take for granted, because it’s so ubiquitous, is actually made by people. It’s not that different from painting a picture.  You’re sitting down, you’re producing a picture, it’s got a message, it’s got an aesthetic, it’s the exact same thing.

LUX: Yet many people resist calling it art. Why do you think this is?
B: I think it is just very new, it came out of nowhere. I was as dumbfounded as anyone by these developments. But I think when people have an experience that connects with them emotionally, like any other type of medium, any other type of art, then it will click with them. But they see the headlines and they see “monkey JPG selling for crazy amount” which makes it easier to call bullsh*t on the whole thing. There’s a lot of distinction between the different things people are doing in the NFT space, with some people looking towards a more baseball-type, collectible thing rather than the art side of things. Then there are people who are trying to make serious work that, in my opinion, is no different from any other artist working in any other medium.

Beeple’s Everydays, the First 5000 Days. Courtesy of W1 Curates.

LUX: Is there not a lot of bullsh*t in the traditional art world as well.
B: Yes, but everybody’s used to that bullsh*t. Also, there are so many people who think NFTs look like crap. Most traditional art looks like crap, you just can’t see it as easily. You can go online and instantly see hundreds of NFTs, but you can’t immediately see hundreds of pieces of traditional art – if you did, you would see a lot of crap I’d promise you that. Or you would see a lot of stuff which looks fine but isn’t new in any way. It’s just the same regurgitated ideas that are 100 years old. It looks more like what you would expect art to look like, but it’s not good. I could make some abstract art that anybody would agree is art,  but it doesn’t matter, that’s not good. I think I’m trying to make things for 100 years from now. I think a lot of traditional art is trying to make something that looks like art right now, and half the time it looks like it would have been made 100 years ago.

LUX: Do you think in 100 years people will look at this, you and others, and think this is an inflection point where it changed, just like things changed with Duchamp?
B: We will see. I don’t know, but I think this is definitely a different moment. I think it will be seen as an inflection point because you’re going to see a massive shift as digital tools and digital distribution become more a part of art, because those advance rapidly, they will continue to advance rapidly with technology. I don’t know a lot about painting but I’m not sure how much it has changed in the last 100 years through technology.

LUX: Does this fit better in the Metaverse?
B: What do you mean by the metaverse? I don’t even know what that means, it’s just a marketing term.

LUX: The space where you can go buy a computer rendition of a Dior gown and put it on an avatar and pay for it. I mean, that’s just the beginning right?
B: Except none of those worlds exist. How much time do you spend in the metaverse?

LUX: Not me, but other people do.
B: No they don’t. If you look at these platforms, nobody is spending any time in them, because they’re not engaging enough. It’s like VR. How much time do you spend in VR? Zero.

I’ve gone all over the world many times and heard people talking about the metaverse, but then they don’t spend any time there themselves. It’s like VR. Fun for 2 seconds and then you’ve done it and you move on.

I don’t think it will always be like that, but I think the first thing we will all consider the metaverse is AR glasses. That is what I think we will consider the first true metaverse is, when all of us are wearing glasses and we can all see a layer of things that are the same, when we can all see a digital sculpture right here, and we can walk around it and we all can point to it, and you see what I’m seeing. Everybody being jacked into VR in a tube of goo, that’s a waste.

Courtesy of W1 Curates

LUX: A traditional collector would buy a painting and put it on their wall. How is this art best displayed?
B: Almost all of the pieces that I have now come with some sort of physical element. Some of them are titanium back-screens, and others are like paintings or giant prints, or these human size boxes. A lot of the pieces have physical components like that because to me it’s important to have a physical way to experience the work. To me, it makes it much more visceral and much more impactful.

LUX: Are attitudes towards digital art changing?
B: Yes, things are changing a lot. We just had Deji Art Museum in China buy a piece, there are pieces at MoMa right now, you’re seeing a bunch of museums invest. I think when people see work that can withstand criticism and has some actual depth to it, then they’ll change their mind.

But it is taking time. I think people who are truly thoughtful and are approaching it with an open mind, with the attitude that they don’t know everything about art and this could be something new that they want to be a part of, those people are coming around very quickly. But that’s not everybody. People have to change their mind of what this is, and that doesn’t often happen quickly.

LUX: And you mentioned street art and graffiti before. Is there a parallel with what happened there 30 years ago where that wasn’t considered art?
B: 100%, I think it’s the exact same thing. I look at this work as the street art of the internet, because you can post anything you want there’s this free for all thing. All street art is trying to get people’s attention, the street part of it is “permissionless” art where they were going out and thinking, I’m not going to get anybody’s permission to do this, I’m just going to do it. That’s how I’ve always operated. I don’t need anybody’s permission to show this, I made it, I put it on the internet, that’s it.

That’s very different from the traditional art world where you make a piece of art, then you’ve got to wait for a gallery or a museum and somebody’s got to look at it and say yes, I will show that. Nobody has to say yes on the internet.

More from Beeple’s VR Series. Courtesy of W1 Curates.

LUX: How did you engage with art when you were a kid?
B: I went to school for computer science. As a kid, I didn’t do a massive amount of art on the side. I was always doing a lot of stuff on computers. At first I wanted to make video games, but then I got to college and I saw some people who wanted to make video games, and I realised I didn’t want it that badly. I was spending all of my time making weird little abstract clips that had no inherent purpose; they were just little tiny artistic expressions.

I was spending my time making short films too, and so to begin there was no sense of wanting to get people to collect my work or making a living off of it. I actually really liked the fact that I didn’t make a living off of it because it meant I could say whatever I wanted. I never cared about commercial art, I just wanted to make people happy. So I had a good separation there, I could say whatever I wanted without thinking about whether this is something someone’s going to hang on their wall. Because a lot of it is not something you want to hang on your wall, to be quite honest.

LUX: The world is getting weirder and worse. Does that help your work?
B: I don’t think it’s getting worse, but I think it will get weirder. That’s also why I make this sh*t weird; because people think that could never happen. But Donald Trump was just your f*cking president! A man-child with no experience who is paying off porn stars. 20 years ago you wouldn’t have said that could happen.

Read more: Visual art and music meet in Shezad Dawood’s latest exhibition

I look at what happened with me and this crazy $70 million sale. That was honestly a weird bi-product of the conversation about art and digital art, and then crypto with nothing to do with art coming into it. As technologies combine like that, in ways we didn<‘t expect, weird things happen. It’s similar to Trump being elected and the role social media played there. Social media comes and everyone thinks it’s great and Mark Zuckerburg is a f*cking hero, liberating all these people. Then time goes on and you think, wait a second, we didn’t see this coming.

That will probably keep happening. There’s gonna be things we didn’t see coming and it can have massively profound effects. The world is so connected now and so digital already; these things can happen so fast. Suddenly millions of people get behind an idea or a movement. I mean, look at the NFTs. Again, we went from zero to being this billion-dollar industry in months. I think weird things are going to happen more and more.

Courtesy of W1 Curates

LUX: Would you like to be recognised by collections who don’t recognise digital art? Is that important to you or do you not care?
B: Yes, I would like to change their mind. I’ve been trying to help educate people in the traditional art world because I think there’s a lot of people in the crypto world who don’t actually care about art. Their allegiance is to crypto, my allegiance is to art.

I just learned about crypto 2 years ago, and I learned about NFTs literally months before that sale. The traditional art world also has a lot of people who, in my opinion, are not in it for the right reasons, they’re just in it for money. But there’s a lot more people who are truly passionate about this, who truly want to see art evolve and are interested in the continuation of art history and contextualising this moment within it.

I’ve been trying to play in both worlds to some extent. There’s a lot more that can be done in terms of NFTs and art being more dynamic. There’s a lot more to come.

Find out more: www.beeple-crap.com

Alan Lo

The restaurateur, collector and leading figure in the Hong Kong art scene on who’s hot, what’s not, and why Singapore may soon be the next Asian art hotspot

LUX: You have been involved in the art world in Hong Kong for around 15 years. How has the scene changed there during this period?
Alan Lo: Hong Kong has become one of the most important art hubs in the world, on a par with London and New York. With Art Basel and M+, as well as local non-profits such as Asia Art Archive, Para Site and Design Trust, it is truly one of the best places to see art and buy art.

LUX: Are Hong Kong and China producing as many interesting new artists as 10 years ago?
AL: Things are a little complicated lately with social unrest followed by Covid, but I still see amazing new talent emerging. Hong Kong artist Ng Wing Lam is one of my latest acquisitions.

Untitled, 2020, by Arjan Martins, from the collection of Yenn and Alan Lo

LUX: Is there a move away from the “Western eye” in recognising artists from the region, or to be successful does an artist still need to be rated by collectors in the US and Europe?
AL: Contemporary art should be borderless. Think of artists Chris Huen Sin-kan and Wu Tsang, who show and are collected globally. As much as China and Asian collectors are on the rise, in the near term the US and Europe are still very influential, so it is important for artists to participate in projects with Western institutions.

Follow LUX on Instagram: luxthemagazine

LUX: Which living artists internationally will be as remembered and sought after in 50 years time as the early 21st-century greats?
AL: Danh Vo, Mickalene Thomas, Shinro Ohtake, Rirkrit Tiravanija.

LUX: Hong Kong is highly digitised. How is digital art interacting with conventional art?
AL: Digital art is very now and Hong Kong is very much at the forefront. From digital art fairs to the level of interest in NFT art among collectors, new and established, these are signs of the significance of this new medium.

Singapore’s bay area by night

LUX: The art-market peak has been called many times over the past 10 years. Will it peak?
AL: Who knows!

LUX: Is there a new generation of collectors making the art market and new artists in their own way, and is that interesting for you?
AL: For sure. Especially in China, we see the emergence of the very young who are buying very well and very quickly. It is definitely a new phenomenon that is here to stay, I think.

LUX: Is the influence of Singapore in the art world likely to increase? Why has it not done so today?
AL: The collector base is quite small today, but with the influx of capital and talent into Singapore, the city state is already seeing change in the scene, and Art SG debuting in January 2023 will be a catalyst.

Bakk, 2022, by Cheikh Ndiaye, from the collection of Yenn and Alan Lo

LUX: Will what you do help stimulate a ground-up art movement in Singapore?
AL: I’m just an insignificant collector, but I do hope to see more artist- and curator-led spaces to make scene more interesting.

Read more: Adrian Cheng On Brands To Watch In 2023

LUX: In 10 years time, will collectors and enthusiasts visit Singapore for its art scene?
AL: There is the potential. Its ecosystem already has Singapore Art Museum (SAM), Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI) and National Gallery Singapore. I’d like to see more collector-driven and foundation spaces, as well as non-profits.

LUX: Name your five most interesting artists in the world right now.
AL: Oh de Laval, Wahab Saheed, Soimadou Ibrahim, Wu Tsang, Sarah Cunningham.

Find out more: @alanyeungkit

Original digital art by Mercedes-Benz at Design Essentials IV: The Art of Creating Desire

LUX stops off at the Mercedes-Benz Design Centre in Nice to hear about its latest projects – from EVs to NFTs, and everything in between 

Few places can evoke desire like the Cote d’Azur. Home to the world’s superelite and their superyachts, it is where the most exclusive communities migrate in summertime – and where the aspirational go to see them.

All of which made it a fitting backdrop for Mercedes-Benz’s latest Design Essentials instalment, ‘The Art of Creating Desire’. Presented between their Design Centre in Nice – a cylindrical, spaceship-like structure hidden in the pine forest of France’s tech hub – and the newly-opened Maybourne Riviera, the showcase featured the marque’s latest projects and outlooks on the future of luxury.

The Mercedes-Benz Design Centre in Nice

‘We aspire to design the most desirable cars in the world. With Design Essentials, we illustrate how we approach this privilege in concrete terms,’ explained Chief Design Officer Gorden Wagener. ‘The venue – our Design Centre in Nice – plays a central role in this. I see it as a creative melting pot where we forge ideas for the luxury cars of the future.’

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That future, according to Mercedes-Benz, is digital. The marque has joined as the fifth and final founding member of the Aura Blockchain Consortium – a non-profit association of luxury brands investing in blockchain solutions for the industry – alongside LVMH, Prada Group, OTB Group, and Cartier, part of Richemont.

Mercedes-Benz is expanding into in-car digital art experiences

‘Every product going forward will have a digital twin,’ explained Daniela Ott, General Secretary of Aura. ‘This is for all the use cases you can imagine, from traceability and provenance to resale and second-hand, NFTs and using the physical products you own in the metaverse’. In Mercedes’ case – the first and only premium automotive manufacturer to have joined the consortium – this means providing new digital art experiences both in-car and beyond.

Elsewhere, the marque is strengthening its commitment to the global fashion scene with the concept Mercedes-Maybach Haute Voiture, an S-Class reimagined through an haute couture lens. The car, which is expected to appear in 2023 in a limited release of 150 units, features a two-tone midnight blue and champagne exterior, and a nappa leather interior with bouclé fabric and gold trim.

The limited edition Mercedes-Maybach Haute Voiture

We also had a sneak peek of the new Limited Edition Mercedes-Maybach. Soon to be available in a 150-unit run, the model was borne out of Project MAYBACH, the off-road EV concept created in collaboration with the late artist and fashion designer Virgil Abloh, which was presented at the Rubell Museum during Miami Art Week. The limited edition model marks the third and final collaboration with Abloh, whose Project Geländewagen set a benchmark for fashion and automotive collaborations in 2020.

The Mercedes-Maybach by Virgil Abloh (left) and Project MAYBACH (right)

The grand finale took place over aperitifs at the Maybourne, where we were introduced to the Vision AMG, Mercedes’ new, all-electric sports car concept, slated for release in 2025. The car offers a preview of the all-electric future of Mercedes’ performance brand, having embarked on an electrification plan which will see electrified alternatives in every segment by the end of 2022, and an all-electric fleet by 2030.

Read more: Octopus Energy Founder Greg Jackson On The Green Revolution

The Mercedes-Benz Vision AMG

Speaking of the formal aspect of the Vision AMG, Wagener said, ‘it continues to write the history of the VISION EQXX and raises it to a completely new level’.

If the future really is electric, we want to do it in the Vision AMG.

Find out more: mercedes-benz.com

Exterior of Pace Gallery in Geneva Gallery. Photograph by Annik Wetter. Courtesy Pace Gallery.

Leading art gallery Pace has long pioneered digital innovations in the art world, and recently announced its first dedicated platform for selling artists’ NFTs. Ahead of the launch in September, LUX speaks to Valentina Volchkova, head of Pace Geneva, about art market trends, collecting habits and Jeff Koons

Valentina Volchkova

1. These days, art collectors can purchase art in various different formats, such as NFTs or tokens, and galleries such as Pace are accepting cryptocurrency as payment. What do you think has brought about these changes?

I look at it as a global subject: life evolves, culture evolves. I joined Pace 12 years ago and I have seen the constant evolution and innovation within the gallery. Marc Glimcher (the gallery’s CEO and president) is very innovative and is always looking for artists and places where people are not expecting to see us. We have, for example, opened a gallery in Palo Alto. In some ways, that decision wasn’t so surprising because there is a pool of collectors and artists who are interested in showing in this corner of the world, but at the same time, we are introducing audiences, from diverse backgrounds, to art that is different to what they’d see somewhere like the Met.

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The pandemic has also changed a lot of the ways in which people consume, interact and get curious about art. It opened up, for us at least, a whole new world and access to artists, to collectors and to press. Before I joined Pace, I opened my own gallery. I was 21 and the gallery was in Paris, in a very conservative place, in Saint Germain, and you would see that people didn’t actually feel comfortable entering the space. Perhaps, it’s because people feel excluded from that environment or think that they have to buy something if they go in. The pandemic, and the forced closure of galleries and different spaces, led to an increased digitalisation not only in terms of art and culture, but also consumerism more generally. Digital platforms provided access to new artists, to new ways of creating art, and to new audiences as well.

We didn’t stop our gallery programme in Geneva because the artists we were showing had other projects planned in another museum or gallery, which meant we had to stick to our schedule. For artists generally, nothing really changed. The majority of them – the painters, the sculptors – were isolated in their studios, and they liked it. They need this kind of isolation, but of course, the frustrating part, for them and us, was not being able to show their work, not being able to install an exhibition and see it live. What happens with the digitalisation of the art is that you don’t have this frustration anymore, it’s accessible to the world. Many artists who had never digitalised their art were suddenly willing to experiment, and for artists who had never shown their work in a gallery, it was an opportunity for them to showcase what they were doing. In that sense, the pandemic opened up a number of opportunities.

Jean-Paul Riopelle, Nouvelles impressions n°15, 1978. © SOCAN, Montreal and DACS, London 2021

2. Do you think these new formats will be maintained in the future?

People are looking for new experiences. They are looking for physical experiences. They have access to so much information and to so many images. Everything is now online: you can go to an exhibition viewing, you can attend a conference all from your computer. I think the digitalisation of our industry was already happening, but the pandemic accelerated it. That doesn’t mean artists will now stop what they had previously been creating, but it means they will also take part in this new, innovative way of creating an artwork. Pace has been involved in these evolutions for a long time with its art and technology programme, with showing digital and immersive art, and I think some artists feel comfortable doing projects with the gallery for that reason.

Lee Ufan, Relatum – expansion place, 2008. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2021 Photo: G.R. Christmas, courtesy Pace Gallery

3. What do you make of Jeff Koons’ recent decision to move to the gallery?

I was actually with Jeff for his show at the Mucem a few weeks ago. He is such a smart and humble person. He knows exactly where he wants to go. There are some artists who have revolutionised the art world and he is part of that group: Cézanne, Duchamp, Rothko, Koons, Picasso. For me, I see it as a very obvious collaboration right now. I think it’s good timing, and this representation comes at a point where the artists are looking for support for their innovative and crazy ideas. Pace is really supportive in that sense.

Read more: A Beginner’s Guide to Collecting Art by Sophie Neuendorf

4. Going back to buying trends, is there a particular artwork or type of art that people are gravitating towards at the moment?

I have made my own observations – in terms of the collectors I’m working with and the shows I put up –  that people are wanting to see and be around art that is reassuring, somehow. Art that deals with current issues, but is also about the environment and brings us closer to nature. Artists are also being rediscovered in those terms and are being shown more than ever. I’m thinking, for example of Kiki Smith, who has done over fourteen shows over the last two years. There is a hunger for art that is accessible and universal, but also established. During the pandemic, people were looking for Rothkos, for Modiglianis, Cy Twomblys and would spend monumental amounts of money for established artworks. The uncertainty of the pandemic meant that we were able to source many of these artworks that we would never manage to source before.

Marina Perez Simão, Untitled, 2021. © Marina Perez Simão. Courtesy Pace Gallery and Mendes Wood DM. Photo by Jonathan Nesteruk

5. Are there any developments, artists or trends that are personally exciting you at the moment?

I am very curious about where we are going right now with the opening of art fairs. I don’t know how they’ll happen, but we’ll see. The pandemic has led us to revisit some of the art movements. Personally, I’m looking to develop the Light and Space movement in a broader way in places where it hasn’t yet been shown. That whole movement is about experience, but is also very universal and accessible. People need that.

6. Now that international travel is opening up, are there any shows you’re looking forward to seeing in Geneva or elsewhere?

I’m excited to see the next step of the Jeff Koons show, which will happen in Florence this fall. The show is very intimate. You might have seen his works at the Centre Pompidou, at the Whitney Museum, at the Fondazione Prada, but the way this show is curated makes you feel very close to the artist and his work. It opens up your eyes to something very sensual, bodily, and attractive.

Pace Geneva’s upcoming exhibition “Silence” runs from 3 September to 30 October 2021. Find out more: pacegallery.com

Installation view of A History Untold curated by Lisa Anderson at Signature African Art London. Photo © Mora Ltd

Lisa Anderson is an independent curator and the founder of the Instagram account @blackbritishart, which she uses as a platform to promote the work of Black British artists, past and present. Following the opening of her latest curatorial project, A History Untold at Signature African Art London, LUX speaks to her about art as an educational tool, the role of social media and the exhibitions she’s looking forward to seeing

Lisa Anderson

1. What led you to set up the Black British Art Instagram account?

Back in 2015 when I created @blackbritishart, the visibility of Black British artists on Instagram was nothing like it is today. There simply were not as many artists online and there was no access to a fluid, intergenerational conversation about Black British art practice on the platform that brought together the works of established pioneers, alongside the exciting waves of emerging talent.

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As an art nerd, who enjoyed following accounts that featured artists across the African Diaspora globally (Europe, the United States of America, the Caribbean etc) and from across the African continent,  I desperately wanted to see an account that championed the variety of black artistic practice in the UK, reflecting the tapestry of works they create across the mediums of painting, drawing, digital art, sculpture, assemblage, collage, textile art, ceramics, and film. I knew the artists were out there, but there was a big digital hole on Instagram, so I decided to fill it.

When I started the platform, no one had yet claimed the hashtag #blackbritishart. There are now tens of thousands of works tagged, which I’m proud to have contributed towards. So, the genesis was curatorial curiosity and passion for celebrating the depth and breadth of fine art produced by Black artists in the United Kingdom – past, present, existing, and persisting.

2. Do you think social media is making art more accessible?

Undoubtedly. Through hashtags and the networked nature of these platforms, you can scroll your way through to an education in your favoured corner, or corners of the art world. I built Black British Art up by finding artists this way and exploring the artists, gallerists, curators, writers they were connected to. As Instagram, in particular, has evolved, the content has expanded beyond just the image or film content. It has become even more informational. Some Instagram pages are designed specifically to promote and educate followers about arts events or provide accessible show reviews through accounts such as @thewhitepube, which is one of my favourites. I have discovered and connected personally with artists online whose works I’ve bought, sold, and featured in exhibitions, such as Enam Gbewonyo and Irvin Pascal. Earlier this year there was also a huge boom in global arts networking through ClubHouse, which allowed arts enthusiasts to access, previously quite exclusive conversations about the art market that have empowered some emerging collectors to make more confident forays into their collecting journeys. And I don’t think the gold rush for NFT Art would have been possible without social media.

3. Tell us about your curation process for A History Untold at Signature African Art. How did you go about selecting the participating artists/works?

The brief for the exhibition stems from the failure of the British educational system to address British history in a truly inclusive and authentic way. In a way that honours all its citizens, thereby fostering respect the variety of cultures and ethnicities represented in modern Britain. In this case our focus is on the absence of a more holistic, complicated approach to Africa in the educational system. Our exhibition tackles this by choosing artists across the African continent and from the African Diaspora in the UK, whose works speak to under-examined areas of history such as Africa’s contribution to the study of mathematics, metallurgy, the development of paper for writing, the political power of jazz music as well as the contribution of African colonial subjects to the building of modern Europe through their efforts in the Second World War. We wanted to choose artists from various countries, whose practice resonated with these themes and art mediums.

4. The exhibition aims to reveal the lesser-known stories of Black history. In developing the show, did you personally learn anything new?

Prior to the show I didn’t know about the Ishango bone and the relevance this has as a marker of mathematic knowledge in the world. It’s such a beguiling and profound artefact. Perhaps the oldest mathematical artefact in existence, unearthed in 1950 in the then Belgian colony of the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and dated to the Upper Paleolithic Period of human history, approximately 20,000-25,000 years ago. This is why I think art should be used more in education. Once you learn about the Ishango bone, it explodes so many myths about where ancient knowledge comes from. It was also interesting to learn more about the variety of African civilisations that developed mastery of metallurgy.

Read more: Director of The Stand Beth Greenacre on the rise of buying art online

In terms of more contemporary history, however, one of the most moving discoveries was the personal histories of the black British artists in the show, Adelaide Damoah and Peter Adjaye, who are collaborating on a sculptural and sound piece. Their work explores the personal legacy of colonialism, as both have Ghanaian ancestors who fought for the second world war. I vaguely knew about the contributions made to the World War efforts by colonial subjects, however, learning the personal stories of these artists has redoubled my commitment to learn and share more about this history.

Damilola Okhoya, Once Upon a Time Under the Blue Skies I, 2021

5. How effective is art as an educational tool?

I believe art is one of the most powerful educational tools, because of its capacity to represent both real life and conceptual ideas in profound and transformational ways. Whether it’s a painting depicting the horrors and madness of war, a sculpture depicting the beauty of the human form, a picture of flowers conveying lost love, or a film work depicting the terror of racial violence, artwork can leave an emotional, intellectual and spiritual imprint that leaves you changed forever. I developed a whole new appreciation of my vulnerability to responsibility for nature’s cycles and the power of the sun after I experienced Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2003. Truly one of my most treasured art experiences. For this reason and many more examples, I could provide, I believe that art was woefully under-utilised as a resource for basic education in my time. But I think the digital realm makes this much more plausible for future generations.

6. Now that museums and galleries have reopened, what are you most looking forward to seeing?

I’m so glad you asked that; I’ve been starved of seeing art in the flesh. There are countless shows I’m looking forward to. Through my Black British Art platform, I promote a list of shows to see that include works from black British artists. This month, I’m especially looking forward to a couple of group shows in London: Self Portrait, featuring a group of black female photographers, on show at Ronan McKenzie’s art space called Home and Citizens of Memory at The Perimeter curated by Aindrea Emelife. I’ve still not seen Lynette Yiadom Boakye’s show at the Tate Modern and really want to see the James Barnor show at the Serpentine. Further afield, I would highly recommend Phoebe Boswell’s show at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham.

“A History Untold”, presented by Maro Itoje and curated by Lisa Anderson features works by Giggs Kgole, Djakou Kassi Nathalie, Steve Ekpenisi, Damilola Okhoya, Adelaide Damoah and Peter Adjaye. The exhibition runs until 19 June at Signature African Art, Mayfair, London. For more information, visit: signatureafricanart.com

Auctioneer Oliver Barker directing Sotheby’s global e-auctions. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

As part on an ongoing monthly column for LUX, artnet’s Vice President of Strategic Partnerships Sophie Neuendorf forecasts this year’s emerging trends and evolutions in the art world

Sophie Neuendorf

We’ve just emerged from arguably the most difficult and unpredictable year in recent history. The Covid-19 pandemic caused a synchronised and deep downturn of the global economy in the first six months of 2020. Social distancing measures and a lockdown of businesses in reaction to the health crisis resulted in falling consumer demand and economic output. Skyrocketing unemployment shook consumer confidence, and companies cut back on investments in light of declining demand, supply-chain interruptions and the uncertain future.

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Amid the uncertainties and restrictions caused by the pandemic, fine art auctions plummeted in the first half of 2020. Total sales value dropped across all major regions. According to the artnet Price Database, global auction sales for fine art fell by 59% to $2.9 billion in the first half of 2020 compared to a more robust performance of $7 billion in the first six months of 2019.

Infographic courtesy of artnet

However, despite a 29% decrease in both the number of lots offered and sold at auction year-over-year, the global sell-through rate remained steady at 65% in the first half of 2020. Major auction houses pivoted to online platforms, generating some incredible virtual transactions. In June, Sotheby’s sold Francis Bacon’s Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981) for $85 million. Roy Lichtenstein’s White Brushstroke I (1965) achieved $25 million.

Even though 2020 will most likely be remembered as one of the most unpredictable and difficult years in modern history, it also pushed boundaries and accelerated the art world into the digital age. With this backdrop in mind, I’m going to take the risk and make 7 art world predictions for the year 2021 – because, if anything, last year has set the stage for some ground-breaking changes to aspire to.

1. Digitalisation is here to stay.

Plato was right: necessity is indeed the mother of invention. During the COVID-19 crisis, one area that has seen tremendous growth is digitalisation, meaning everything from online customer service to remote working to supply-chain reinvention to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to improve the art business. As I discussed in my last column of 2020, the digitalisation of the art market is here to stay. With galleries, museums, and auction houses pivoting online and thinking outside the box in response to the pandemic, a positive trend of accessibility, efficiency, and transparency accelerated within the art world. This also goes hand in hand with a global trend of sustainability and conscious living.

Naturally, an online viewing of art can never quite replace the in-person experience, nor should it. The impact of seeing Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa online is, of course, not quite the same as admiring it in person. However, the transactional element of the art market will emerge as a strong contender to the traditional brick and mortar purchasing process, democratising the art market and opening it up to a new generation of art lovers.

2. Some art fairs will actually happen this year. But they will be a balanced, online/offline experience.

With social distancing still de rigueur this year, it will be difficult for fairs to accommodate their usual amount of art-loving and people-watching visitors. Add to that a gallery’s sky high participation costs, especially after a difficult year, and we’re looking at only very few fairs happening in 2021. My conservative prediction is that those of us able to travel can look forward to visiting ARCO Madrid (which has been postponed to July), Art Basel in Basel, Volta Basel, Frieze London, FIAC Paris, and Basel Miami, at best. The rest of us will have to enjoy the virtual editions of these fairs again this year.

Read more: COMO Group CEO Olivier Jolivet on travel trends for 2021

3. Galleries will evolve as serious contenders to art fairs and traditional auction houses.

Gallerists have always been of utmost importance as a bridge between the creative genius of an artist and the wider public of art lovers and collectors.

This year, galleries who have embraced the innovation which the Covid-19 pandemic necessitated will emerge stronger than ever. Either through online sales and viewing rooms or through collaborations with other galleries and institutions, these art dealers will rise as serious contenders to brick-and-mortar auction houses.

4. Some young artists will start bypassing galleries and begin selling directly out of their studio via social media or other websites.

It’s already a widespread practice among young artists in Asia and I foresee it crossing over to Europe and the US this year. With countless galleries, unfortunately, having been forced to close over the last year, many artists may have become increasingly accustomed to selling via social media and other websites. Especially young artists may be inclined to bypass the traditional route expected of them by the art world, and chose to build their careers independently.

Roy Lichtenstein’s White Brushstroke I (1965) was sold by Sotheby’s for $25 million. Image courtesy Sotheby’s

5. Socio-economic issues will be at the forefront of major gallery and museum shows this year.

Artists have, historically, documented moments of change and upheaval. After a year that has compelled us to come to terms with a global pandemic, has seen us fight for equality during the Me Too and BLM movements, as well as confront global warming, now’s the time to examine these pivotal moments within gallery and museum shows.

The arts are known to push boundaries and open up discussions around difficult and oftentimes painful subjects in a spirit of tolerance, curiosity, and learning. I believe that galleries and institutions will harness this unique moment to exhibit artists who are capturing the zeitgeist.

Francis Bacon’s Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981) was sold for $85 million at auction by Sotheby’s in June 2020. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s.

6. There will be more fine art works sold at auction this year than over the last few years.

Given the global economic and private difficulties we are currently facing, it wouldn’t be surprising if the IRS, a divorce attorney or the grim reaper force the sale of many a private collection. It’s a rather gruesome prediction, but historically the art market has been very active during a time when some micro or macro-economic situations are under stress.

Looking at Deloitte’s Art & Finance report or artnet’s Intelligence Report, fine art has gradually emerged into a serious asset class. When you compare fine art sales to the S&P, for example, more often than not it is art which is a safer alternative asset than stocks or even real estate. It is highly likely that many artworks will find speculative buyers this year, as economic changes and challenges will cause a shift in wealth.

Read more: Visual artist Clara Hastrup on her studio experiments

7. There will be a major shift in the market resulting in a new focus on quality rather than quantity.

Life was moving along as rapidly and frivolously as usual during the months before the Covid-19 pandemic forced us into seclusion. It struck me even then that the art world was moving into an unhealthy direction, where being seen at a champagne reception was more important than the quality of work on display. Where people-watching at Frieze or Basel was far more interesting than any oeuvre, and gossiping about people or prices trumped any serious deliberations of the works on view.

However, the past year has forced all of us to focus on what’s truly meaningful within our lives and on how fleeting it actually is. How do we really want to spend our time? Do we actually have to visit all of those art fairs and events? Perhaps we should seize the moment and focus on those artists and personal interactions that really enrich our lives.

This may seem like a rather wild prediction, but I’m certain that only those galleries, fairs, and institutions will survive that really concentrate on bringing added value to our lives. Perhaps we will move to a ‘new normal’ where multiple editions of the same fair or gallery are unnecessary, but are, instead, complimented by an incredible and easy to access online offering. Now is the time to excite with quality, depth, and innovation – because time is precious.

Infographic courtesy of artnet

8. Art will not only evolve as an asset class, but also as a financial product.

Over the past few years, art has slowly evolved as a serious contender to assets such as gold, stocks, or real estate – and it is arguably a much more stable asset. Given the high barriers to entry into the art market, specifically to the high-returns, blue chip market, I predict that there will be a derivative product developed soon, to be traded on the market similarly to other indices.

Price indices offer important insights for anyone looking to track the performance of a collection of artworks produced by a single artist or movement. At artnet, for example, we already provide an innovative price index methodology that relies on the unique strength of our flagship product, the Price Database. Our proprietary method creates indices that track the evolution of artwork prices over time, which can be tailored to focus on artworks belonging to a specific medium, movement, size, or any combination thereof, and in comparison to other indices, such as the S&P. It’s only a matter of time until the exchange traded derivative is developed. Stay tuned!

Follow Sophie Neuendorf on Instagram: @sophieneuendorf

FLOCK (shown here in the deTour 2020 virtual space) is an interactive artwork by Whatever Inc. and one of Shin Wong’s favourites from this year’s festival

Born in Taipei and raised in New Zealand, Shin Wong is a global creative influencer and this year’s curator-at-large of Hong Kong’s art and design festival deTour. Ahead of the festival’s virtual launch on Friday, LUX speaks to Wong about her favourite work at this year’s edition, the value of digital platforms and her love of French decadence

Shin Wong

1. This is the first year that deTour is taking place online. Whilst this is clearly driven by the pandemic, do you think this format can offer added value to arts festivals and fairs in general?

Definitely! The mission of deTour is to introduce design talents from Hong Kong to the rest of the world and vice versa. It is also a perfect platform to showcase new innovative designs from overseas to the greater China region audiences. Through virtual connection, I believe we can bring like-minded people together, explore ideas and job opportunities, and moreover, celebrate the joy of creativity wherever you are.

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2. Can you tell us more about this year’s festival theme and your role in the curation process?

The theme this year is the “Matter of Life”. With all what’s happening around the world and the big social movement in the city last year, this is probably the most important and relevant topic we could reflect on. The pandemic gave us extra time to rethink what designers can bring to society today.

I am the curator-at-large of deTour and my job is to overlook the creatives and all the programmes from a holistic point of view. I’m kind of like a chef who is garnishing the menu, adding extra flavours and spice, except that my job involves inviting and commissioning awesome, best-fit designers and providing different perspectives for the team, curators and artists to think about.

The Book of Ashes by Cheung Hon Him at dePont 2020

3. What are the benefits of bringing art and design together in one exhibition?

I think it’s impossible to separate art and design! It is our job to find balance in how we showcase novelty designs and expressive art in a big-scale festival. The curation itself is a piece of art.

Read more:  ‘I’m sick and tired of self-obsessed art’ says visual artist Afshin Naghouni

4. What design trends do you predict we’ll be seeing more of in 2021 and beyond?

Personally, I would like to see more work on sustainable designs. We’ve already caused enough damage to our world and we are all responsible to make it better.

God Catcher by Riyo & Obie at dePont 2020

5. Do you have a favourite era of art and design from history?

The French Neoclassical Period (Louis XVI era) where everything was over-the-top lavish, pure decadence. One can never get bored looking at the art and design from that era.

6. If you had to select one piece from this year’s festival, what would it be and why?

“FLOCK” – a simple and beautiful digital interactive work, celebrating life, love and joy. Exactly what we need! I am also a fan of Masashi Kawamura‘s work, and so we are super excited to have Whatever Inc. at deTour this year.

deTour 2020 takes place virtually from 27 November to 6 December. For more information visit: detour.hk

‘La marea bajita’ from Diango Hernández’s Instopia Instagram project

Dusseldorf-based, Cuban artist Diango Hernández has been blurring the lines between the virtual and physical since 2015 with his ongoing Instagram art project Instopia in which he digitally places his own artworks into existing photographs of luxury spaces. Nick Hackworth speaks to the artist about ownership, challenging perceptions of reality and the culture of revolution

Diango Hernández

LUX: Can you describe Instopia in a nutshell?
Diango Hernández: Instopia is an ongoing series of images that show artworks of mine in extraordinary places; a painting of mine hanging, for example, in a luxurious villa in Greece or Capri or, say, a huge sculpture inside a high-end ‘white cube’ gallery in New York or London.

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There’s a bit of magic or sleight of hand, in the way these Instopia images are made. The process begins with me finding an image of one of these luxurious spaces on Instagram or online. Then I design a virtual artwork, it could be painting, a mural or a sculpture, that I think would look perfect in that particular, photographed space. I take into careful consideration of all the elements of the spaces, its colours, lighting and textures. Then I digitally place my artwork into the image of that space and post up this new picture onto my Instagram account. The work only becomes Instopia only when makes you believe that it’s “real”.

LUX: How did you come up with the concept?
Diango Hernández: It wasn’t actually about the irony, cynicism or any form of mockery. It was just that very often when I came across beautiful images of luxurious places I always found in them, some spaces that I thought would be good for my art. But people got offended by the project because it challenged their ideas of reality. They’d look at an Instopia image and ask, ‘How real is it?’ or ‘Are you lying to me? You don’t have a painting of yours hanging in that beautiful mansion!’ I lost friends because of Instopia. In fact, the longer I’ve been continued the project the more that other artists and art dealers have reacted strangely toward me.

‘Cadenas de agua’ from Diango Hernández’s Instopia Instagram project

LUX: Why do you think people in the art world reacted so strongly?
Diango Hernández: They were upset, insulted even, because they thought I was using these Instopia images to pretend that my work was hanging in this space or was part of that great collection or museum. For instance, I’d replace a Francis Bacon one of my paintings in an image and people would be like, ‘your work isn’t in that collection!’ They’d be really rude, but I would say to them, ‘I’m not bound to the sense of reality you have. I come from another country, another tradition.’ I still believe we have can an intense dialogue with pictures. Pictures are more serious than most people believe.

Read more: Loquet’s co-founder Sheherazade Goldsmith on creating sustainable jewellery

LUX: In the captions of your Instagram posts do you refer to the reality or unreality of the image?
Diango Hernández: No. On Instagram you have a few elements that will imply a level of truthfulness: the image, the hashtags and the text. I work with all of these elements to make you believe, as much as possible, that the post is real. This is why people got really upset. Galleries even cancelled shows. They had collectors calling and telling them that I was abusing the internet. I was like, ‘Are you kidding me guys? Don’t know the history of collage?’ It just shows you how contradictory the contemporary art world is. Everyone is busy selling the ‘new’ and the ‘radical’ but only a few can really deal with what is really new.

Cielo bajo el agua (above) and Tu muchas veces (here) from Diango Hernández’s Instopia Instagram project

LUX: The negative reactions to your work are interestingly hypocritical. Instagram is a vast, collective platform which people use to project or imagine their own fantasies. But as usual, things get conservative when people with money get upset…
Diango Hernández: Exactly. When people complain about me inserting an artwork into an image of their beautiful interior, they are effectively saying, ‘Come on, I have spent millions of dollars on this living room!’ A lot of the outrage is connected to people’s sense of ‘property’.

Read more: Laid-back fine dining at Knightsbridge restaurant Sumosan Twiga

Most of the legal issues I’ve had have come from photographers complaining that I’d abused their copyright. That make sense as people are crazy about property. They forget that artists challenge and question that very notion of ownership. Somehow, we have to do it, it is in our DNA. A world without people questioning private property is an unfair world. But it’s true that my way of doing this is more ‘gentle’, I just add ‘value’ to your beautiful property by adding my ‘art’ to it!

Ojos claros (above) and Noches (here) from Diango Hernández’s Instopia Instagram project

LUX: Do you think of your work as having a punk or anarchist spirit?
Diango Hernández: I’d say my attitude isn’t so much punk, I’d say it comes out of the culture of revolution. To illustrate what I mean, a particular story comes to mind…

In the Havana of the 1940s and 1950s there was a very fancy country club park, frequented by Americans and the Cuban bourgeoisie. In January 1961, the Cuban revolutionary leaders Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were enjoying a drink just after they finished a game of golf at the club. They were pondered the future of the country club, since all of its members had fled the country. There and then Guevara proposed the creation of a complex of tuition-free art schools to serve talented young people from all over the Third World. ‘The school must be built just right on top of these holes,’ Che Guevara said.

Cuban revolutionary leaders Fidel Castro and Che Guevara playing golf

A few years later Cuba’s National Art Schools were built. In the design they attempted to reinvent architecture in the same manner that the Cuban Revolution aspired to reinvent society. To this day the art school is one of the most beautiful buildings ever built in Cuba.

That idea of subverting the function of that exclusive country club into a school for the arts, seems to me, like a radical and powerful act of collage. There is a lot to learn from the history of design and architecture. One valuable lesson is that transforming images and the values they embody is one way of transforming our reality, culturally and socially. I want people to interact more thoughtfully with images and to create ‘better’ pictures.

Follow Diango Hernandez on Instagram: @diango.hernandez

Nick Hackworth is a writer and curator of Modern Forms, an art collection and curatorial platform founded by Hussam Otaibi, Managing Partner at Floreat Group. 

‘Butterflies’ by James Wilde, MA Photography

As the RCA’s virtual graduate show comes to a close, LUX explores its diverse offering of curated collections and events

Over the last few months, art schools across the UK have been heavily criticised by students for digitising their degree shows. Whilst it’s true that something is inevitably lost in the process of viewing art virtually, digital shows can also provide a unique creative opportunity for young artists to present their work in a different format to different audiences.

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In the case of the Royal College of Art, the school has launched an entirely new ‘digital discovery’ platform, bringing together around 850 emerging artists, designers and creatives from the departments of Architecture, Arts & Humanities, Communication and Design. The platform profiles the students and groups work together in thoughtfully curated collections alongside a programme of events which run throughout the day in the form of Q&A discussions, presentations and screenings.

‘Bittersweet’ by Olivia Sterling, MA painting

“This is a show that is unlike any other. It marks the culmination and conclusion of work that was made in extraordinary times. It was work made in flats and apartments and homes around the world. Work made on the dining room table. It somehow marks – I think – a victory for creativity, for ideas. And for excellence, regardless of the circumstance…,” said Sir Jony Ive, RCA Chancellor, whose curated collection entitled ‘Optimistic, Singular and New’, features a small series of bold artworks that employ a variety of different artistic mediums.

‘Untitled’ by Lowena Poole, MA Photography

Read more: Three top gallerists on how the art world is changing

Artist Es Devlin has curated another intriguing collection of work entitled ‘Towards a Digital Placeness.’ “I came to this impressive final year online show at the RCA with a mission: to find the artists, thinkers and makers who might become the builders and cultivators of digital ‘placeness’,” she says. “I was looking for those who might help those in my generation emerge from the shady limbo-land of half-in-half-out, half in the car, half answering emails, half talking to a friend, half flicking through Instagram. I was looking for those who might help us cultivate a more honest, more full-bodied commitment to our digital presence.” The works that she has chosen engage with topics of the future such as AI and eco-anxiety, expressing a tension between familiarity and otherness through the creation of new and striking visual languages.

‘In the Pink’ by Rosa Whiteley

The spontaneity and slowness of a physical gallery experience might be missing, but the virtual sphere offers diverse audiences a rare opportunity to access and engage with the next generation of artists. All you need to do is open your laptop and click the link: 2020.rca.ac.uk

The RCA 2020 graduate show runs until 31 July 2020. For more information on the school, visit: rca.ac.uk

Inside OMM designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates. Photo by Batuhan Keskiner

This September will see the opening of Odunpazari Modern Museum (OMM), a major new art museum in Eskişehir, Turkey. Designed by architects Kengo Kuma and Associates, the museum is the brainchild of art collector Erol Tabanca, whose collection will provide the permanent exhibition, and his daughter Idil Tabanca who sits at the helm as Creative Director. We speak to Idil about her multidisciplinary approach, creating an international cultural destination and the challenge of bringing contemporary art to new audiences.

Idil Tabanca. Photo by Emily Hope

LUX: You were one of the founding editors of the successful New York-based art and fashion magazine Bullett – do you see yourself primarily as a journalist?
Idil Tabanca: No, not at all. I studied digital media because I always thought I was going to go into film. I wanted to do set design, production design, that kind of thing. Growing up that was my dream. I just wanted to make stuff. After I graduated, I worked in film for a couple of years on various projects in the US and then I was called in to do production design for a film in New York and that’s where I met the people I ended up setting up the magazine with. We just fell into, it was very organic and we didn’t have any money so we became our own publishers because we had all this great content that we wanted to put out. There are so many stories which aren’t at all luxurious like we would get our friends to dress up as catering staff for the cover shoot of some Oscar winning actor. We didn’t have the money to hire actual caterers but we wanted to keep up the appearance. It was like the con that didn’t end.

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LUX: And you’ve gone from that to being the Creative Director of OMM.
Idil Tabanca: Well yes, and this is a very different project because for starters, it’s my family’s foundation. My father [Erol Tabanca] started collecting art about thirty years ago. It started out just as a pure love for art and the pleasure he got from it, there was no strategy involved. He was buying what he wanted to buy. As time progressed, he filled up his house and then his entire office, he didn’t have enough room for the art and he also wanted to share the works that he found so inspiring so he started the foundation. That was around the time I was closing the magazine because the internet happened. It happened to the world. So many magazines were closing. The museum is a great opportunity because if I was at another institution like this, it would’ve taken me a really long time to be here. I felt like there could be an opportunity for me to have a voice, to have a say for the young people that needed this kind of a platform back in Turkey.

I feel like there’s huge potential in Turkey for artists, but not necessarily any organisations and platforms. The exciting part of the project for me is that I can actually give young people that opportunity.

Erol & Idil Tabanca pictured outside the museum. Photo by Gökhan Polat

LUX: Have you always shared your father’s passion for art?
Idil Tabanca: It was part of the magazine: we covered art, fashion, culture and cinema. I have always been interested in video and photography because of my studies, but I don’t have this amazing knowledge of art history or anything like that. It wasn’t part of my education so I’m learning that part now. Even just getting familiar with the art collection is a huge amount of work. I feel like I’ve got a good sense of aesthetics, but I’m learning the rest. I’m exposing myself to a lot of art, I read a lot, go to a lot of exhibitions.

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LUX: Can you tell us more about your concept for the museum?
Idil Tabanca: We’re from Eskişehir as a family and people from Eskişehir are very proud because it’s like a secular, intellectual, very young and fun town in Turkey. It’s very unique. They say it’s like a European city in Turkey. People are very open minded and because of that, there’s a huge potential for young people. There are also three art universities. My father has always felt that he wanted to give back to that community in some way.

We chose Kengo Kuma, whose work is so iconic, to make the museum iconic. Bilbao was an industrial city before the Guggenheim came and now it’s known as an art destination; I think Eskişehir has that same potential. For a long time in Turkey because of the regime and what’s happened there, there hasn’t been a lot of exciting developments. We also don’t have a huge museum culture. I don’t have any memories of going to museums with my family. I love that we might be able to change that for some people, and to change the place. Having a museum like this, starts an exchange, it becomes a bridge between cultures. For example, we have Kengo Kuma’s work  and we have Japanese artists who are showing. We want different cultures to be able to merge in the space.

Photo by Batuham Keskiner

Photo by Batuhan Keskiner

LUX: We hear that the museum is also going to have a strong connection with fashion, is that right?
Idil Tabanca: Yes, I want every aspect of the museum to be like an art work in its own right and I’ve got Turkish fashion designer Dilara Findikoglu to design the uniforms for the museum staff. She’s blown up recently and dresses people like Madonna. I think that she’ll be the creative director of somewhere like Alexander McQueen very soon. But the reason for collaborating with her was, firstly, to challenge people. She is completely embraced internationally and keeps winning fashion awards, but in Turkey I feel like it’s part of our culture to be suspicious of anything that’s actually good and we do that to artists too. We don’t appreciate them at home as much as you do in Western culture. In Turkey, there’s no sense of protecting the things that are valuable and that’s the same with ruins even, you’re just allowed to walk all over the place. So I want to work with and give value to artists and designers from our communities that are doing really well outside of the country. That’s the reason we’re putting together a homecoming show to start a dialogue about who we are as a culture and why we don’t appreciate these people or talk abut them. We have local celebrities, but they’re not the people who are making a difference in the world.

‘Sleeping Girl’ by Hans op de Beeck is one of the artworks in the permanent collection. Photo by Kayhan Kaygusuz

LUX: And how will the exhibition programme work?
Idil Tabanca: We have the permanent collection, which will constantly change and be curated by different people and then we’ll have travelling shows and events. Exhibitions by other artists who have nothing to do with the permanent collection. For example, we’re bringing work by Marshmallow Laser Feast (who recently had a VR experience at the Saatchi gallery) to the opening. They’re really interesting because they use technology to bring people back to nature – I’m really excited to collaborate with them. Also the other part which will be so exciting for me is that we’ll get people coming to the museum who haven’t been exposed to anything, we’re going to get such a raw audience.

One of the selected works from the opening exhibition: Uyuyan Adam (2010) by Ramazan Bayrakoğlu. Image by Ozan Cakmak

LUX: What are local attitudes towards contemporary art? Is there much of an existing art scene?
Idil Tabanca: Yes, there is definitely an art scene. There’s a tiny wooden museum, glass blowing is huge and there are lots of little shops that make ceramics. There’s part of the town which is all these old houses, which look like they would have hundreds of years a go. There’s a wax museum, which is hilarious because no-one looks like they’re supposed to, but it receives 11,000 visitors on the weekend, which demonstrates the lack of cultural activities. But yes, we’re in talks with the art universities. We want to have residency artists that come in from abroad and to give them access to the facilities. We’re also going to organise discussions and education programmes. There’s the only animation studio in Turkey there so there’s definitely a lot of potential.

Read more: Savoir Beds’ MD Alistair Hughes on the value of craftsmanship

LUX: Are there any contemporary Turkish artists that you’re particularly excited about at the moment?
Idil Tabanca: Nilbar Güreş’ work is phenomenal. She’s based in Vienna. Another one of my favourite Turkish artists is Sukran Moral. She’s definitely someone I’d love to bring [to the museum] sometime in the future. She’s pretty established and is currently based in Italy.  She’s fantastic. Also Fatma Bucak is another young Turkish artist that I’d like to bring to the museum. She has some wonderful videos.

‘Aylin’ (2014) by Sinan Demirtaş will also feature in the opening exhibition. Image by Kayhan Kaygusuz

LUX: How much of a consideration is sustainability?
Idil Tabanca: The building is made from sustainable forests, and we are trying to make it all as sustainable as possible, but in a place where that dialogue hasn’t started yet, it’s going to be tougher for us. So we have this task of talking to people and explaining to them why it’s important, why we’re not giving out plastic bags for example. I think it’s the responsibility of institution like ours to be a leader on these kinds of things.

LUX: Lastly, for first time visitors to Eskişehir, what are your hot tips for things to do and see?
Idil Tabanca: Oh my god, there’s so much to do! There’s a really good thermal spa. Then there’s also this fake Disneyland that I think is fascinating. You go and Snow White has her wig on sideways, it’s just a very weird place. The old part of town too where they have all these really cute houses and artists with their own little studios and shops selling handmade things. The area is called Odunpazarı, and it’s so beautiful. The museum is right in the middle of everything so the best way is to just walk around and discover the area.

OMM will officially open in September 2019, for more information visit: omm.art

‘Vesuvius in Eruption’ (1817–20) by JMW Turner

The Watercolour World is an ambitious online project to digitise the world’s watercolours and rescue this all-too-often overlooked but artistically and historically significant medium from being forgotten. It is creating a wealth of riches for all of us, says Michael Brooks

Fred Hohler describes the idea as “blindingly obvious” in hindsight. Having spearheaded the creation of a digital record of the United Kingdom’s oil paintings, the former diplomat soon realised his Public Catalogue Foundation had left an ‘orphan’ collection of watercolours in dark drawers, cabinets and basements across the world.

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Now, though, these paintings are emerging, blinking, into the light. The Watercolour World is a rapidly growing website that hosts digital reproductions of watercolours from around the world. Even in these early days – the site’s official launch was in January 2019 – it has become an engrossing collection. Whether you are captivated by an 1840 view of Kings Cross as a rubbish dump – the ‘Great Dustheap’ – or sailors chasing a slave ship near Zanzibar in 1876, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of riches is coming into view. “I have a new favourite about four times a day,” Hohler admits.

Watercolour is often passed over as an unimportant medium, despite the fact that Ruskin, Gainsborough, Turner and Constable all used it at various times. “The lower status of watercolour was owing to the fact that it had been invented relatively recently, had not been used by the Old Masters, and was widely used by amateurs for documentary purposes,” says Sir Charles Saumarez Smith, senior director of Blain Southern gallery, and former chief executive of the Royal Academy of Arts.

‘Untitled’ [Section of the tomb of Psammuthis in Thebes, discovered and opened by Belzoni in 1818] (1817–20) by Giovanni Belzoni or Alessandro Ricci

At Woolwich Military Academy and elsewhere, officers studied drawing and were taught how to survey a landscape and draw coasts and harbours so that the knowledge of newly gained territories could be spread amongst the military. The watercolourist Paul Sandby was among those who did the training, and the courses were clearly popular, with many accomplished amateur painters emerging from the military academies. As a result, military, government and private collections are awash with watercolour landscapes from across the world, all painted with an attention to detail.

‘The Great Dust- Heap, next to Battle Bridge and the Smallpox Hospital’ (1837) by E. H. Dixon

Many of them, however, have not seen the light of day for decades, if not centuries. “Watercolour as a medium is naturally more susceptible to the effects of heat and light,” says the charity’s chief executive Andra Fitzherbert. “As a result, they tend to be hidden away in dark places or kept in albums where they’re rarely pulled out and enjoyed.”

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And that’s where The Watercolour World project comes in. Launched with the patronage of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, and realised through support from the Marandi Foundation, The Watercolour World aims to collate hundreds of thousands of watercolour paintings, many of which have never been available to the public until now.

‘Untitled’ [eruption of Mount Vesuvius, 1760–61] (1776) by Pietro Fabris

‘Woodland Scene with a Peasant, a Horse, and a Cart’ (c. 1760) by Thomas Gainsborough

Just as exciting is the scientific potential of the project. Many watercolours offer a view of a world that no longer exists and are a means by which conservationists, ocean scientists, coastal engineers and geologists can reach back into the past, make sense of the present, and perhaps safeguard the future.

There is strong precedent for this. In the 1860s, the government moved the Gunditjmara, the Aboriginal people of the area, off Tower Hill, an extinct volcano in Victoria, Australia. They proceeded to clear the land’s thick vegetation for grazing. Only in the 1960s was there a move to restore the area. Fortunately, the watercolourist Eugene von Guérard had made a painting of the virgin land in 1855, a painting so detailed that the authorities could identify more than 20 species of plant to use in the restoration project.

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The vast and growing catalogue of paintings in The Watercolour World means that similar restorations might be possible in other areas. Some of the paintings are already in use in a project to catalogue changes in the British coastline over the past 250 years. Geologist and coastal engineer Robin McInnes is in the closing stages of The State of the British Coast Study, which was commissioned by The Crown Estate, the European Commission and Historic England. Using a range of sources, including paintings in The Watercolour World, McInnes has been able to discern where and when beaches have eroded, cliff lines have changed and engineering projects have made an impact on the shoreline. The results of the study will be used to aid conservation and ecological efforts. “They’ve been feeding me coastal images, many from private collections that have never been seen before. I’ve been able to use some in my study,” McInnes says. Some are from less highbrow sources, too. “Postcard companies employed some prolific watercolour artists to paint the coast.”

‘The Encampment in Hyde Park’ (1781) by Paul Sandby

Another environmental application will be in surveys of glaciers. Watercolours have a strong history here. The first known depiction of a glacier, made in 1601, was Abraham Jäger’s painting of the Rofener Glacier in Austria. By the middle of the 19th century, artists were painting faithful renditions of scenes at the heads of glaciers. John Brett’s Glacier of Rosenlaui, for instance, shows the position of the glacier in 1856, as well as a detailed portrait of the erratics, the boulders at its head that had been carried by the ice. The Watercolour World’s collection includes renditions of glaciers by Horace Bénédict de Saussure, the precision of which give a marker for recent glacier retreat. “Climate change is on almost everybody’s mind right now, but in the 19th century artists and scientists were working together documenting glaciers,” says Barbara Matilsky, who curated last year’s ‘Vanishing Ice’ exhibition at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis. Many of the show’s 47 artworks, dating from 1860 to 2017, showed evidence of climate change.

‘Bat’s Hole’ (no date) by Henry Joseph Moule

Using The Watercolour World as a scientific resource is a “fabulous idea”, Matilsky says. She points out that artists and scientists have long worked together to document the natural environment. In the 19th century, for instance, geologists at the Museum of Natural History in Paris commissioned artists to paint glaciers. “They wanted to show students what they look like so they could intuit from these works the processes that formed the glaciers,” Matilsky says. “Scientists were very much aware that artists were important in communicating scientific concepts.”

At the other end of Earth’s temperature scale, The Watercolour World includes dozens of paintings of volcanoes. The 1776 eruption of Vesuvius is particularly well represented, because the British diplomat Sir William Hamilton commissioned the artist Pietro Fabris to paint 54 illustrations of the volcano for his scientific studies of its geology.

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Fitzherbert is keen to point out that The Watercolour World will be of relevance to everyone, not just to scientists and culture professionals. All of the images have searchable location and keyword information, allowing people to explore their family history and their local area’s past. “We want to make it personal so that people can navigate through a map and find local places of interest and find family homes or where they were brought up,” she says. “People can use these paintings to reflect on their own lives.”

The Watercolour World operates a small team, equipped with a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, to perform the digitisation. In addition, a group of volunteers tag and categorise the images, adding their locations and all relevant data about the artist’s intentions. Only then are they uploaded onto the site.

The project has yielded unexpected gains. One is that, in some ways, the website offers something even better than a gallery viewing. The scanners provide a depth of colour and an ability to zoom in that just aren’t available in a static display. What’s more, observing the paintings on screens means they are, effectively, backlit. “You see it in an entirely different way,” Hohler says. “It’s given a brilliance to these images that you don’t otherwise get.”

Though the collection is already clocking in at 83,000 images, a queue is forming. “The wonderful thing is, as soon as you launch a project like this, it belongs to everybody,” Hohler says. Many institutions and organisations have offered their digitised collections. The Watercolour World is even receiving offers to scan private collections that have never been made public, let alone digitised. “We’ve been overwhelmed by people’s positivity and encouragement,” Fitzherbert says.

Find out more: watercolourworld.org

This article was originally published in the Summer 19 Issue

Artist Philip Colbert in his studio

London-based contemporary artist Philip Colbert works within the self-defined movement of ‘Neo Pop Surrealism’. His distinctive, wildly vibrant aesthetic speaks of a hyperactive age swollen with imagery, media and symbols. His oil paintings are chaotic, visual overloads, creating imaginary surrealist dreams of swirling Colgate toothpaste roads, falling currency signs and laugh-crying face emojis.

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The exhibition “Hunt Paintings” presented by Unit London at the Saatchi Gallery pop-up in Los Angeles, coinciding with this month’s Frieze art fair, brings together a diverse range of artworks, including large-scale paintings, sculptures, and a virtual reality experience which transports viewers into ‘Lobster Land’. The title makes reference to the old master hunt scenes, depicted in works by artists such as Reubens. Reflecting on the violence of these scenes, Colbert’s collages teeter on the edge of nightmare, reflecting on the darker side of pop culture that lies beneath the sheen, slogans and humour.

‘The Year of the Lobster’, a collaborative work with art auctioneer Simon de Pury, is the most striking satire and an exhibition highlight. The surreal video is an art auction come pop song come music video, ridiculing the art world, consumerist society, advertising and modern day paranoias as de Pury calls out brand names and slogans, continually asking the viewer: “You do like that lobster, don’t you?”

Installation shot of ‘Hunt Paintings’ by Philip Colbert at Saatchi Gallery, Los Angeles

“Philip Colbert – Hunt Paintings” runs until 11 March 2019 at the Saatchi Gallery pop-up, 8070 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles. For more information visit: theunitldn.com/whats-on

Check out the next issue of LUX magazine, on sale from May 1 for a fabulous collaboration with Philip and Charlotte Colbert.

Installation shot from ‘Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today’ at the ICA/Boston, 2018: ‘Imagination, Dead Imagine’ (1991) by Judith Barry

We live in interesting times – so interesting, in fact, that not only are artists using ever-newer technologies and digital tools, but we are witnessing a whole new generation emerging: artists who were born, live and create with and on the internet. Anny Shaw investigates

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For several years now, neuroscientists have been arguing that the internet is remapping our brains, rewiring our neural connections – for better or worse. Now it appears that the internet is having a profound effect on artistic practice, with artists creating perpetual iterations of works or keeping projects in continual development, like the tabs left running in your web browser.

“There’s a freedom artists have now, which is perhaps a symptom of how the internet impacts on people’s thinking. There’s never a next stage or a finished version; the possibilities are endless,” says Elizabeth Neilson, the director of London’s Zabludowicz Collection.

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Neilson points to the artists in the collection who use virtual reality (VR), such as the Canadian artist and film-maker Jon Rafman, who continues to work on his animated film Dream Journal that he began in 2015, and the US artist Paul McCarthy, who has created 15 versions of C.S.S.C. Coach Stage Stage Coach VR experiment Mary and Eve (2017), a project first unveiled at the Venice Biennale in 2017.

Watch Dream Journal by Jon Rafman:

Another, younger case in point is the painter and self-taught programmer Rachel Rossin, who has previously worked for the American VR firm Oculus. The Zabludowicz Collection pre-purchased her acclaimed VR work The Sky Is a Gap (2017), which Rossin has described as “a Zabriskie Point-like explosion of a building”. The piece premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2017 and the latest version, specially commissioned by the collection, is due to go on show in London in March 2019. “No matter that the work already exists in one form, Rachel will keep working on it,” Neilson says.

The London-based writer and curator Omar Kholeif takes the idea a step further. He suggests that works of art could soon start to evolve independently of the artist. “It’s not about upgrading the video apparatus, it’s about upgrading the coding and how a work of art might actually be produced,” he says. “You could acquire a piece that in 10 years might be completely different. Every time it’s shown, it could be different.” Kholeif is behind two ground-breaking shows examining new media and net art: ‘Electronic Superhighway’, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2016, and its technologically updated sequel, ‘I Was Raised on the Internet’, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in June 2018.

‘Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation’ (2016) by Sondra Perry

Of course, net art, or art made on or for the internet, is nothing new. Its genesis can be traced back to the early 1990s, when a diverse group of artists including Vuk Ćosić, Joan Heemskerk, Dirk Paesmans, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina and Heath Bunting began to exhibit online and to build programs to create software art. Even then, artists were exploring the idea of open-ended projects. In 1994, the Israeli-American artist Yael Kanarek began World of Awe, a fictional online diary of a traveler in search of treasure, which she updated several times before finishing it in 2011. Meanwhile, John F. Simon Jr has said that his ongoing work Every Icon, which began in 1997, will take several hundred trillion years to complete with the 1.8 x 10308 possible combinations of black and white squares in the icon’s 32-by-32 grid.

Read more: Artist Tom Pope’s ‘One Square Club’

For these pioneers, the internet was a nascent phenomenon, but, for Generations Y and X, blogging, Tweeting and posting to Instagram are second nature. Indeed, it is increasingly common for younger artists to be just as well-versed in programming as they are in painting. The American artist Ian Cheng, for example, studied computer science while Toronto-based Jeremy Bailey trained as a software developer.

Still from ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013) by Camille Henrot

Despite this, there is still a tendency to view the internet as a site for distribution rather than as a space where art can simply exist, Kholeif says. “Artists have a real discomfort with not being part of the white-cube gallery or institutional realm, because that is a space for validation where income is generated,” he observes.

There are, of course, exceptions. In 2011, the Dutch-Brazilian artist Rafaël Rozendaal wrote and made available, with the help of his lawyer and dealer, a sales contract specifically for the sale of websites as works of art – the domain name is transferred to the collector, who must renew it annually, while ensuring the website remains free and available publicly.

‘David, Florida, USA, 28th September 2015’ (2015) by Celia Hempton

Other artists have employed the internet as a form of activism. HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican, a collective of artists and activists, founded thewayblackmachine.net in 2014, an ongoing project that tracks via the internet the proliferation of images, mobile phone videos and news clips of the systemic violence against African Americans by white Americans. “The piece is a reality check about how little the needle has moved despite the wide access to and circulation of these images,” says Eva Respini, the curator of ‘Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today’. The exhibition, which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston in February 2018, was one of the largest historical surveys of its kind to be mounted in the US.

Respini acknowledges that it is difficult to be optimistic in these divisive, post-truth times, citing “the proliferation of fake news, the internet’s nefarious influence on politics, mass surveillance, and in some areas of the world, strict control over information on the internet”. But she also believes that digital media has given “incredible power” to movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, “mobilizing and giving visibility to those with marginalized voices”.

‘Juliana’ (2014–15) by Frank Benson

Meanwhile, the artist and writer Miao Ying, who divides her time between Shanghai and New York but whose official biography states that she “resides on the internet”, dedicates much of her work to censorship in China. In 2016, she launched Chinternet Plus, a web-based project commissioned by New York’s New Museum that parodies the Chinese government’s much-hyped Internet Plus, which is aimed at rebooting economic growth but is carefully managed (read: censored) by the government.

Read more: In conversation with artist Victoria Fu

Miao describes her relationship with the Chinese internet as a form of Stockholm Syndrome, whereby she has formed a bond with her ‘captor’. “Chinternet Plus is self-censored,” she says, and consequently full of branding and devoid of content. Despite its seeming banality, Chinternet Plus has been blocked in China for several months. Miao adds that she would never show her political work in China. “A lot of my art has two versions; one is a self-censored version that I show in China,” she explains.

Still from ‘RMB City: A Second Life City Planning 04’, (2007) by Cao Fei

At the end of 2018, Miao unveiled a new website, Hardcore Digital Detox, commissioned by the privately run museum M+ in Hong Kong. Due to open in 2020, M+ is already known for acquiring digital art, such as its recent purchase of the entire archive of the internet art collective Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, as well as the rights to all their future works by the duo.

The acquisition reflects the growing interest of institutions in net art. This has been spurred on in part by 2019’s 30th anniversary of the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal of the concept of the world wide web to his colleagues at the research organization CERN. As Respini notes, “1989 was also the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tiananmen Square, and arguably the beginning of our global era that we cannot imagine without the internet.”

This article was first published in the Winter 2019 issue.

‘Double Curtain 1’ (2017). Victoria Fu.

California-based artist Victoria Fu, the official artist of 2019’s Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge at Frieze Los Angeles, is at the forefront of exploring the realm between the digital and the analog, as she explains to Anna Wallace-Thompson

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Victoria Fu

Hazy circles of red, blue and aqua overlap, a Venn diagram of mingling new colors emerging from textured surfaces. Elsewhere, scratches like the snags on celluloid skip across the faded screen of a computer desktop. They exist amongst a procession of lights and shadows, but – like the most famous shadows of all, on Plato’s cave wall – which are real, and which are not?

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It’s a good question, and one that Californian artist Victoria Fu finds immensely intriguing. In an ever more digitized world, Fu is interested in the space between the real and the virtual, the analog and the digital. This duality leads to lush, textured works and installations comprising layers of shapes and forms, blurring the boundaries between what is physically there and what is digitally inserted (or even projected) onto a surface.

‘Medium Square 4’ (2018). Victoria Fu.

Born in Santa Monica, and a Stanford and CalArts alumna (she is also the co-founder of The Moving Index, an online database of all things video art), Fu’s artistic practice explores how we navigate time and the body within this evolving area. “When I began working with moving image installations (film and video), I found myself migrating into the digital and virtual world, away from the materiality of film and its processes,” she explains. “I started to feel what can only be described as a sort of existential loss of the ‘real’ – whatever ‘real’ is. The loss of a connection, of situating my body in time and space. I addressed this loss through combining both analog and digital elements in a variety of installation formats and configurations.” With works such as Double Curtain 1 (2017), part of her solo show ‘Télévoix’ at New York’s Simon Preston Gallery in 2017, for example, she literally divided the room to create a double-sided installation that played with contrasts such as dark/light and physical/virtual, and showed her fascination with what the normally unseen rear of an image might be like. Meanwhile, in ‘Velvet Peel’, her solo show at LA gallery Honor Fraser in 2015, her interest in how we interact with our world was evident in Pinch-Zoom (2015), a large, Las Vegas-style neon sign in which fingers pinch in and out, as when manipulating the touchscreen of a smartphone.

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LUX: You probe what lies behind an image. Can a digital image really have a ‘back’? Can you turn it over?
Victoria Fu: While working on Belle Captive 1 (2013) for the Whitney Biennial, I was making installations with faux walls. You could see a projected image on the ‘face’ of the wall, but if you went around the back, it was the unfinished raw wood frame of the structure, revealing the image as nothing more than an empty façade. I started thinking about how an image is, for lack of a better word, so ‘flat’ and one-directional. It begged the question: what’s on the other side? How would one conceive of an image ‘in the round’, or sculpturally, in installation?

‘Belle Captive I’ (2013). Victoria Fu

LUX: How are you exploring this other side?
Victoria Fu: Part of what appeals to me is the unknown, and the spookiness of it as well. What is the dimension of a pixel – does it have space? What is behind it? Let’s flip it over! So much of what we see on TV, in films and advertisements, is all done in post-production. There are all these layers of things that don’t really have a root in the ‘real’ world. In most films, you can sort of imagine what the air smells like in a room between a figure and the background, you have that sense of dimension and place. But with enough computer-generated elements, there are so many disparate layers all spliced together to form a coherent image reality. There’s no texture. There’s no ‘smell’. I’m fascinated by that glassy emptiness.

LUX: Wait, what do you mean ‘the smell’ of an image?
Victoria Fu: How do we make sense of our relationship to images through our bodily senses? How does the act of touching the screen and the new haptic dimension of images influence how we understand where we are in the world, and to some degree who we are? There’s an ontological element to these acts, how we make sense of our being – obviously we use our eyes in this image-saturated world, but now we’re ‘touching’ images too. It makes sense then that we might try to make use of our sense of smell. What does an image smell like? Textures in certain images can conjure up an abstracted sense of smell. With some digital images there’s a void, like when you have a cold and you can’t taste or smell anything. It’s that absence that I find so interesting, as a texture in itself.

‘Scoop’ (2015). Victoria Fu.

LUX: There’s a lot of this duality in your work – the landscape that exists between the ‘there’ and the ‘not there’.
Victoria Fu: I identify with a generation that grew up in an analog world but is perfectly fluent and comfortable in the digital. I’m interested in mixing things together in a way that one can’t extract what part is digital and what is analog, and in showing how these things are inextricably connected to each other as images.

Read more: Meet the new creative entrepreneurs

LUX: How so?
Victoria Fu: Double Curtain 1 from ‘Télévoix’ is a single film frame that contains the glitches and by-products of hand-processing film. The shapes on the curtain are scratches on film emulsion, and the particular way in which the different color layers of emulsion flake off. I then took this film image to somebody in Hollywood who works with 3D post-production, and they extruded 3D shapes out of the 2D ones, almost like creating a topological map of a landscape, and printed it on the back of the curtain. The double-sided curtain expresses these dual worlds – it’s the same world, it’s one curtain, yet that reality can be expressed in more than one way (depending on which side you’re standing). There is a video projection on the wall behind the curtain that imagines what kind of shadows that 3D-extruded shape would cast. This is the game of telephone, where each translation distorts the next iteration of the original – hence the name of the exhibit, ‘Télévoix’.

LUX: How important to you is the viewer’s body in the space itself?
Victoria Fu: Very – it’s one of my primary interests. A work can be viewed as documentation, as a video file, and still engage somebody, but it really is a different experience in person. I think a lot about how we spectate, how we situate ourselves in time and space in relationship to the moving image, and how that is changing. When you view one of my moving-image works there are moments when you can get quite comfortable and immersed in the narrative, and then there are moments where you are yanked into another space – and sometimes it’s the very gallery space you’re sitting in. This back and forth is what I find interesting, where you never quite sit comfortably.

‘Small Pinch-Zoom (white)’ (2015). Victoria Fu.

LUX: Have you thought about working in virtual reality?
Victoria Fu: I’m curious about VR but I draw the line at interactivity and an actual touchscreen. I enjoy the buffer between spectator and image, and that’s kind of where I live. VR still emphasizes a kind of cinematic looking in a way that might be in keeping with my interests.

LUX: Speaking of the moving image, the Frieze LA venue is Paramount Studios, a real film lot. Does that relate to your work in any way?
Victoria Fu: With Frieze opening in LA there’s a very conscious coming together of Hollywood and the art world, and I think there are a lot of commonalities between the two that I embrace, as it’s very relevant to the content of my work. The language and tools of film production are central subjects for me. I think the context of Hollywood will help underline how I am thinking through the processes and tools of how we create a visual reality through the moving image, and how we are changing as spectators, from viewers to users in a melding of the two.

Victoria Fu has been invited to create a site-based installation in the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge at the Paramount Theater, Los Angeles, presented in collaboration with Deutsche Bank’s Art, Culture & Sports division. Deutsche Bank has been supporting cutting-edge artists globally for more than 35 years – building a substantial collection of works on paper, recognizing young artists with awards and commissions and organizing numerous exhibitions and museum partnerships. For more information visit: art.db.com

This article was first published in the Winter 2019 issue

Tolani Shoneye, Milena Sanchez and Audrey Indome of ‘The Receipts Podcast’

Remember the days when being creative meant you were someone who couldn’t cut it in the world of real jobs? Now artistry and enterprise go hand in hand, says Emma Love

Photography by Kate Peter

A LUX x ROSEWOOD COLLABORATION

What do you get if you cross eBay with Instagram? The youth-targeted, app-based selling platform Depop where vendors post images of the items that they want to sell, that’s billed as the ‘creative community’s mobile marketplace’. Depop can be as basic as a teenager posting pictures of unwanted jewellery they are selling from their bedroom, and as sophisticated as a highly stylised vintage fashion shoot – quite possibly also created by a school kid from their bedroom.

For many millennials, these apps are a neat way to make extra money on the side; the most entrepreneurial have turned selling via Depop and marketing themselves on social media into full-blown businesses. Jade Douse fits into the latter category. After realising how much money she could make by selling clothes on Depop, she teamed up with friend Symone Mills to set up street-style-inspired label Oh Hey Girl on Big Cartel in 2016. “It was a slow burner until we started putting sponsored ads on Facebook and Instagram,” recalls Douse. “We literally went from making £8,000 to £35,000 in a month.”

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Two years on, with fans including models Bella Hadid and Jourdan Dunn, Instagram is still integral to their business. “It’s our biggest network,” says Douse. “And sponsored ads are cheap. There really is nothing to hold anyone back from giving it a try.” Alongside the brand’s strong visual identity and magazine-worthy styling, its success lies in its simple shopping process: click on a pair of high-waisted, belted jeans or a puff-sleeved shirt on @ohheygirlstore and you are redirected to its website to pay. It’s a shopping solution for design conscious, iPhone-wielding buyers, and easy to manage for iPhone-wielding vendors. No wonder it works.

Jade Douse (above) and Symone Mills (here) set up Oh Hey Girl in 2016, selling exclusively online

“Social media is increasingly becoming [the place] where we discover new products,” says Petah Marian, senior editor at WGSN Insight, the industry analyst. “For many people, it feels like an intimate place to spend your time. When you see new things on these platforms, you get the sense that it’s a friend suggesting an item,even when it’s a professional influencer.”

The biggest challenge for Oh Hey Girl? Being able to react quickly in a fast-paced industry.“We’re always looking at how other brands market themselves, so we can find similar strategies that work for us,” explains Douse, who says she wouldn’t dream of doing anything else.

Retail isn’t the only industry where advances in technology have spawned out-of-the-box thinkers creative enough to carve out a unique niche. Research from Nesta and the Creative Industries Council shows that the creative industries are driving economic growth across the UK, with one million new jobs expected to be created between 2013 and 2030. “There are many jobs in the creative industries that didn’t exist 20 years ago,” explains Eliza Easton, principal policy researcher on creative economies at Nesta. “In terms of new sectors, the impact of digital can be seen across the board,especially in areas such as augmented and virtual reality, where we found 1,000 specialist companies making £660million in sales.”

Watch the LUX x ROSEWOOD film featuring the entrepreneurs

Read more: Where leading scientists and cutting-edge poets meet

Deborah Dickinson, associate professor in creative practice at City University London, agrees, citing UK Government statistics that show the creative industries were estimated to be worth £87.4billion in 2015, up 34 percent from 2010. “One of the most fascinating aspects of my job teaching creative industries to undergraduates for the past decade has been the complete change in the type of creative enterprises students move into. Probably the biggest area of job growth and employment opportunities is around digital technologies.”

One place where the impact of the digital revolution is most evident is on online platforms such as Sedition, where you can buy, rent and trade limited-edition digital artworks which are viewed on any connected device or screen.“When we first started Sedition it was an entirely new concept,” recalls director Rory Blain. “Before the digital advent many artists were working on the fringes, waiting for the technology to catch up with the vision they had. For us, it was the big advancement in screen resolution and bandwidth that meant artists were then happy to present their work on a screen.”

Take artist Gordon Cheung, whose New Order series of paintings, derived from the Dutch Golden Age and modified using an algorithm, sell on the website. For Cheung, who creates a deliberate ‘glitch’ in the code to distort the image, it’s been a learning curve. “The first time I used the code it took five minutes to make one glitch; I calculated that if I wanted to do 2,000 glitches it would take far too long,” he says. His solution to speed up the process was to ask a friend to create a user-friendly interface. Experimental artist duo Overlap, AKA Michael Denton and Anna McCrickard, also use software programmes to deliberately disrupt their music and moving-image-based artworks, including Lands, an audiovisual series of 40 iterations of the same multilayered electronic landscape (also available on Sedition).

Michael Denton and Anna McCrickard use Sedition as a platform for their audiovisual art

“The values that are attributed to digital artworks are exciting and frustrating at the same time; a lot of people are still nonplussed by time-based painting,” says Denton, who started out VJing for big-name music acts nearly 20 years ago. “The other side of the coin is that people are getting used to listening and reading things in different ways.” He is also excited at how the creative industries are moving forwards, and what the future holds. “In terms of where it’s going next, I think more people will become specialists in more obscure things. Technology throws up so many creative possibilities and so few of those have been explored. For instance, in visual-editing software, there isn’t a facility to move images around in relation to bars of music. If there was, I would be using it all the time, but areas like this haven’t advanced at all.”

This year, Nesta studied 41 million job adverts to identify the digital skills required for a ‘future-proof’ job, and it seems the most secure involve creativity. “What’s going to be needed is cognitive thinking and communication, so creative jobs are most likely to grow as they require those skills,” says Easton, citing a boom in entrepreneurship as another current industry trend. “In the creative world, a third of people are freelance. It’s a sector run by entrepreneurs who are willing to take risks on their own ideas.”

Instagram bristles with micro-entrepreneurs selling their own artistic creations. A LUX editor recently bought a triptych of postcard-sized oil paintings from an up-and-coming artist still studying at Oxford – a creative vendor and a purchaser connected via an algorithm.

Derin Adetosoye at work on her YouTube channel

But nowhere can the new creatives be seen more dramatically than on YouTube. While a certain group of young stars are making a name for themselves with channels that focus on lifestyle and beauty, there are more interesting talents beneath the superfice, including under-the-radar vloggers putting a fun spin on everyday topics. There’s photographer George Muncey whose Negative Feedback channel offers practical advice on editing photos and shooting film at night for instance, and London College of Fashion student Derin Adetosoye whose videos tackle helpful subjects such as exam tips and what university life is really like.

London College of Fashion student Derin Adetosoye has 30,000 YouTube subscribers

“YouTube is such an interesting platform because it allows you to have the best engagement with your audience,” explains Adetosoye, whose videos have led to her cohosting the Exam Essentials web series for BBC Bitesize as well as catching the attention of BBC 1Xtra. “You can articulate things better than you would be able to via a written blog and your audience can really see your personality. It’s also immediate so you can understand how a subject is resonating with viewers.”

Read more: Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst on the art x technology revolution

The biggest obstacles she has had to overcome include shyness at filming in public and finding ways to make her subjects more amusing. “When vlogs first started it was all about showing every single thing that happened in your day. Now, they tend to be shorter, better planned and more entertaining. It’s a good thing because it means that the viewer is getting the best content.” Although Adetosoye has no plans to make a full-time career from vlogging, she doesn’t see herself stopping anytime soon either. “When people tell me they’ve aced a test or chosen to take a particular degree because they were inspired by my videos, it’s heart warming.” And as Easton concludes: “YouTube and Netflix are platforms, but without content they are nothing. It’s the content that defines how we want to use these new platforms.”

Another flourishing platform is the podcast. Once often just the best bits of radio shows, podcasts now are producing some of the most thrilling new content (and popularity is rising: figures released in 2018 by Radio Joint Audience Research, the official body measuring UK radio audiences, revealed that six million adults in the UK listen to a podcast weekly). From comedies such as My Dad Wrote a Porno (which has been turned into a live stage show and is set to be a HBO special too), to singer-songwriter Jessie Ware’s Table Manners about ‘food, family and the art of having a chat’, it is the current medium of choice for opinionated, personal broadcasts.

Tolani Shoneye of ‘The Receipts Podcast’

“Podcasts allow more voices to be heard,” agrees journalist Tolani Shoneye, one third of the trio that hosts The Receipts Podcast, which delivers straight-talking conversations about all kinds of subjects from relationships to music. “In the past if you wanted to get something made you’d have to go through the proper channels. Now there’s more freedom; anyone can make a podcast and have a voice.”

And that’s the irony. In an era when the human race is fearing redundancy, or worse, due to AI developments, creative disciplines, aided by technology, are booming as never before. Millions are taking the opportunity to be both creative and entrepreneurial, something AI is ill-suited to do. Even as machines poise to take over, creativity has never had it so good.

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Book your stay: rosewoodhotels.com

This article was originally published in the Winter 2019 issue.

‘Inside Out, Au Pantheon, Nef, Paris, France’; by JR (2014)

It’s not just the consumption of art that is being revolutionised by technology; it’s all about the democratisation of who can become a creative, and the effect this can have on society, says Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst

A LUX x ROSEWOOD COLLABORATION

Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst

A few years ago, I became aware of teamLab, an extraordinary group of  artists based in Tokyo. They have over  500 members in their organisation, and they  come from all walks of life. When you meet  them and exchange business cards, you will find one might be an architect, one might be a programmer. It’s quite an astonishing  group, all working together to create these amazing visual experiences. At the time, they had had numerous exhibitions in Japan; their immersive interactive digital works result in hugely colourful exhibitions.

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Most of their subject matter is based on the natural environment: they create flowers, birds, trees, fish, butterflies and waterfalls, and the viewer becomes part of the experience of the exhibition. Through the way in which their algorithms work, the artworks respond to and interact with visitors. Some of the pieces are very large, such as one in Tokyo where you roll up your trousers, take your shoes off and walk across the floor, and (digital) fish touch you, swim around you and swim away. In these exhibitions, the work is programmed at the start of the exhibition, but is influenced by the visitors. The artist stops having control from the moment the first visitor appears, which moves things on from the repetitive visual loop you would see in earlier video art displays.

teamLab digital art installation ‘The Infinite Crystal Universe’

It was when we [Pace Gallery] were hosting a show in Palo Alto, California, by teamLab, in the old Tesla factory, that it became evident that the old ‘white cube art gallery’ model was not the way to support artists such as these. The exhibition was ticketed, the space was huge, and it travelled to London and Beijing; its size and reach were beyond anything a traditional private gallery could host, as it had large-scale public appeal.

Tech engineers and programmers creating art is a major change for the future of creativity in general, and the art world in particular. Five or 10 years ago, I felt the art world to be slow on the uptake of technology. These artists are now creating a new world of art through technology, understanding the tools you need to bring the disciplines together. You have teams of people with science and technology backgrounds and others who have studied art together in a studio – people with sharply different backgrounds and skill sets. It’s unlikely you would have had engineers in an art studio just a decade ago.

Read more: Canary Wharf Group’s MD Camille Waxer on urban transformation

This means that participation is no longer just about the art world; we are reaching a much broader audience. Previously, the art world was confined to a very small percentage of people. Now the reach of these new types of art is much broader; through social media, millions are seeing it, and millions are visiting exhibitions by artists such as teamLab, JR or Random International. Studio Drift, a team we work with in the Netherlands, has just had an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which was one of the most-visited shows the museum has ever done.

They have a much wider reach than a typical contemporary art show. This in turn means there is a whole new category of people experiencing this kind of creativity, who wouldn’t go to see a show of works on canvas. It opens doors to new audiences, and it also by extension gives the opportunity for people to start to see themselves as artists who may not have otherwise considered doing so.

Here and above: ‘Trancending Boundaries’ by teamLab

We are in a moment in time when much is changing. Groups of artists have a much bigger reach, they are involved in conversations around nature and sustainability and technology, and all these artists care very much about how art can be part of people’s lives, moving nature into the built environment, and seeing how nature can be incorporated into modern life.

With FuturePace (through which we represent artist groups like these) and our partner Futurecity, we are involved in conversations with airports, cities and placemakers. There is a public realm element to it, lifting people’s lives with art experiences. JR, for example, is not just a street artist. He has a message he wants to convey, he is understood by a very broad swathe of people (he has 1.2 million Instagram followers) and his work has the power to transform societies. He has worked in favelas in Brazil, set up schools, started projects to feed homeless people, and worked against gun crime. He has seen that art has the power to speak to people and transform. He is very passionate and energetic in what he does, and he deals with art that is aimed to be visible to the many, not the few. And his art is not just for the wealthy. The democratisation of art is the next frontier, outside of the world of the galleries. It is an inclusive movement, inclusive of people who can make it and also of those who can consume it.

Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst is a former president of Pace London, the international gallery group, and co-founder of FuturePace, a collaboration between Pace and the placemaking city developer Futurecity. Find out more: future-pace.com

This article was originally published in the Winter 2019 issue. 

3D lenticular print of a slipper orchid from the 2016 series ‘Naturalium’ by Rob Munday, launched at Photo London 2017

How would you like your children’s portrait done – in oils, large-format photography,or 3D hologram? LUX Editor-at-Large Gauhar Kapparova meets Tamara Beckwith, the London society art dealer who represents Rob Munday, holographic artist extraordinaire

Artist Rob Munday

If, as a creator of portraits for global high society, you had to choose two subjects to star in your portfolio, you couldn’t do much better than Karl Lagerfeld and the Queen Elizabeth II.

And that is precisely who is on show, in 3D, downstairs at Tamara Beckwith’s chic The Little Black Gallery in west London. Beckwith, who has transformed from It Girl to charity supremo and art dealer over the past decade, represents Rob Munday, the near-legendary holograph and graphic artist.

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Munday was commissioned by Chanel and AnOther Magazine to create a portrait for a limited-run holographic cover for its 15th anniversary issue. And before that, he had worked with graphic designer-artist Chris Levine to create an official holographic portrait of the Queen.

Other subjects have included Angelina Jolie, musicians Noel and Liam Gallagher, sports presenter and former England football star Gary Lineker, and children’s author Michael Morpurgo.

A portrait of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld by Rob Munday, commissioned for the 15th anniversary issue of AnOther Magazine in 2016 and used for a 3D lenticular image

Now you can have Munday create a holo-portrait of you, your children or anyone else in your life – although not pets. “We are now doing private commissions,” says Beckwith, “and we are getting lots of interest from my friends who are men who have beautiful wives and children.”

 Read next: President of Pace Gallery Marc Glimcher on making art for all

Beckwith is herself a collector of photography. She says she started collecting the likes of Terry O’Neill, Robert Doisneau and Horst P. Horst when she was young and adds that she was taken by Munday’s work because it was portraiture. “I don’t like anything abstract, it leaves me cold. Even if I go around a beautiful exhibition and someone is explaining to me how clever the artist was and how he was the first person to paint something like this, I’m like, really?”

Munday’s 2017 portrait (made with Willy Camden) of actress Angelina Jolie has been used in a Guerlain fragrance campaign

As well as her evident passion for portraiture, Beckwith will also bring her formidable contact book to bear on the project. Munday will not be producing many private commissions –they will be for just the right people. Beckwith, who also runs a society charity event every year in aid of the Gynaecological Cancer Fund, knows exactly who they are.

Rob Munday is represented by The Little Black Gallery, thelittleblackgallery.com

‘Dark Waves’ by teamLab, the Japanese interdisciplinary group that brings art, technology and nature together, at their 2017 Pace London exhibition Transcending Boundaries

Pace Gallery, under the leadership of owner Marc Glimcher, is one of the leading forces on the global contemporary art scene. With his visionary plans for spectacular multi-media shows, he is taking art into the future. But he is also stepping in to curate art in public areas in parts of America where local government funds are low, a role where the private sector’s responsibility will only expand, he tells Darius Sanai in an exclusive interview

LUX: With current developments in public art, it is felt that private initiatives and galleries, such as yours, are taking on the role of public services.
Marc Glimcher: Absolutely. There is a level of ambition that people have and this is true I think in all sectors. For example, when comparing the art and tech world: academic ambitions have grown so large that they have become private, corporate ambitions. That is quite a well-documented thing now. We see Silicon Valley companies and so forth taking on this role of being consumers of social good as well as entrepreneurs.

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In the art world I think we are seeing the same thing where developers see that a public mission has melded with their commercial vision and purpose. And without that public good the commercial success is not enough, it’s not guaranteed and it’s not balanced, so we find ourselves taking on that role.

Marc Glimcher (right) with the artist Kevin Francis Gray at the opening of his show at Pace New York in 2017

LUX: Is there a danger that these become one man or one group’s vision of what public art should be? And is that good or bad?
MG: Well, it always has been. This isn’t purely true but great individual visions have guided great cultural achievements. Committees are not famous for having inspired or patronised or enabled great cultural moments to happen. It is something done with passion by someone who kind of parallels the artists. When a municipal committee get together to decide what the art is going to be on some public site, you don’t get the best result. When someone in that group has a real vision, pushing it as if it were their private vision, that is when amazing things happen. I don’t think there is any history of somebody’s private vision hurting the quality of cultural intervention.

LUX: Can you tell us more about your initiatives. What’s forthcoming, how will it work and how will communities be involved?
MG: It’s very complex. The gallery system was set up to represent an artist and the artist makes their work and the gallery shows it and sells it. The process for these public commissions is much more akin to an architectural process. What do we have coming up? We’ve got 10 projects around the world right now where we are making proposals, the first one being ‘The Illuminated River’. And we have projects in New York and Massachusetts, Australia, London, and China where there are new cities being built every day. I will say that London seems to be at the centre; it’s a fertile place to have those conservations about this idea. That’s where we found Mark Davy, founder of Futurecity, who we are in collaboration with for Future\Pace. We’ve set up a group who can function using the economic model of the architectural world to address an arts project; it’s a very different approach. We are going out to developers and municipals. We are helping to draft a cultural agenda and will be working with our artists and others who are not necessarily gallery artists but who work on a public scale and acting as the planning group to get this job done.

‘Impermanent Life’ by teamLab in Transcending Boundaries at Pace Gallery

LUX: And is this driven by your desire that more people should be able to see and experience art?
MG: Yes. Our natural driver is the artist and we see among the artists a desire to bring the message out into the world. We take our cue from them so it’s a natural evolution for us to feel excited when we get a chance to have Leo Villareal light all the bridges crossing the River Thames. It’s the same with artist estates. We recently took on the estate of the American sculptor Tony Smith. He is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century and one of the most important sculptors aware of public engagement and their experience of space. My father drilled it into my head that this is our family’s contribution to help these artists get their message out and extend human perception. When we got 200,000 people to our teamLab exhibition in Menlo Park, California, it was pretty thrilling.

LUX: What’s it like to take over your father’s business. Is it just a job or something else?
MG: It’s a unique challenge. You have to survive the first 20 years without killing your father and struggling with self-definition. People may deny it but every second-generation person with any kind of ambition has to come to peace with the fact their father created something from scratch, and you’re never going to be that person. So who are you going to be? And what are you going to do? You know you’ve made it when you won’t let your father leave instead of trying to kick him out.

LUX: And I guess your relationships with artists are at the heart of what you do and how you define your relationship with the business?
MG: Absolutely. That’s what we experienced growing up, being surrounded by the artists. It’s a very complex business. There are many different agencies involved – there are the museums, the collectors and the writers. You need to remember what your core is in a complex business and ours is the representation of the artists. If you maintain that there is a way to cross from one generation to the next and to create a real institution.

LUX: What thrills you, what makes you come alive?
MG: For me it’s walking into the artist’s studio and seeing their breakthrough, that spectacular invention that they have created, and knowing you can transmit that out into the world. I will get a call from Tara Donovan, who will have been struggling on a new body of work for a year, and she will say “I’ve got it”. And you can hear in her voice that something has happened. Some transformation took place. And as an art dealer you get in the car and you’re the second person to connect to that creative moment. Or you can get on a plane because Adrian Ghenie called and you arrive in Berlin, go into his really dirty, really dark studio, go around the corner and there is this work that has just been dredged out of the great history of painting. Then everything you do is about bringing it out of the gallery and into the world, to the museums, to the lectures and so on. If that makes you come alive then you are an art dealer.

Read next: Moroccan artist Ghizlan El Glaoui’s unique visions of beauty

LUX: You studied sciences. Does that bring you a different perspective to others in your business?
MG: It might. I definitely think that it has worked well for me. The art gallery is very concerned with historical process, not just the individual process of one individual artist. The rigorous training and analysis that one gets in immunology or biochemistry translates well into trying to understand how the broad sweep of culture works and how artists work.

A London showing of works by Italian artist Mario Merz, organised by Pace Gallery in collaboration with the late artist’s foundation

LUX: And in terms of artists, there must be more competition than ever to find and represent the best artists? Or is that irrelevant because more people are becoming artists?
MG: No. It is very relevant. There is more competition and it is shaping the art world. The galleries are growing. In a market place when the demand is going up at the same time as the competition, you tend to create more consolidated, larger companies to deal with all the various competitive issues. It becomes very expensive to be an art gallery so it’s harder for mid-level galleries. Although, the population of artists is so diverse that there are still artists for every kind of gallery. It’s hard to imagine big galleries replacing the smaller galleries because small galleries are absolutely essential for emerging artists. And there are a lot of artists who don’t want anything to do with the big galleries. In 1975, when you had an artist popular in New York City it meant that if you wanted to keep working with them you had to do a full colour catalogue instead of black and white. Now that same artist, or a comparable artist, is popular in New York, Korea, Europe, China, South America and there are multiple museums competing for shows. There are awards and biannuals and art fairs. It requires an enormous amount. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not about flying artists around in private jets and having expensive parties. It’s about funding the production of work, shipping it all over the world, organising exhibitions, lectures and symposiums and about supporting the museums who have commissioned your artist. We have 17 registrars in charge of handling and moving the art and making sure it gets where it’s supposed to be in perfect condition. That is twice the size of our PR staff, which is big, too.

LUX: Would collectors of these popular artists in 1970s New York have been in the artistic, cultural, media community themselves? And how has that demographic changed since then?
MG: No, that’s a myth. Art patrons haven’t been other artists or writers, although they have always collected artists when they were starting out because they were the ones who knew about them but they always get priced out. In the 70s the collectors were the real estate developers because they were the most entrepreneurial, upwardly mobile group of wealthy people in America, Japan and around the world. They were priced out by an emerging financial class of hedge-fund people who were collecting more aggressively, and they in turn might be displaced by technology people.

teamLab’s digital work ‘Impermanent Life’ (2017) visualises the cycle of life constantly changing

LUX: How do you view the debate about the fragmentation of art, that there are no movements in art and no significant artists anymore?
MG: I view it as something that people always say about their time. People are very sceptical, very hard on their own moment in history. We’ve never heard anyone say now is a golden age of great art. Golden ages are always in the past. In the day when those southern California light and space artists were coming out, believe me, people said, “Oh god, this is so desperate, nobody knows how to make great art, they’ve forgotten”. Now we have special effects and digital artists. Great art is always made, it just takes a while to be recognised as such.

Read next: Olympic high jumper and Richard Mille’s newest partner Mutaz Essa Barshim on the importance of timing

LUX: What are the most interesting things going on at the moment at Pace?
MG: We have our art and technology and public art strategy that we have been working on for the last five years and it’s all bearing fruit at this point. More importantly than that, it seems like it is playing a significant role in the global cultural dialogue. That’s always the place we want to be – making significant dialogues. Both art and technology and the way that those groups making art in this way have a certain capacity to work in public spaces. But the nature of the art making also creates natural limits to what the artists can do. There were 20 requests for sky spaces from James Turrell for every one that could be done. New cities get built around the world with new large-scale developments and these groups want to engage in art, they don’t want to engage just with design. So it’s a call to the artists to find a way to work on a bigger scale. It’s driving the creation of art collectives along with the fact that this is a very collaborative age. We are seeing amazing possibilities arise.

LUX: Which artists are really exciting you now?
MG: We are very excited about Tony Smith because people haven’t recognised his greatness. There is a lot of great painting that is being done right now by the likes of Adrian Ghenie and Nigel Cooke. Tara Donovan, who is kind of a post-minimalist artist, her show sold out in a day! We are about to have a Robert Mangold show and Bob, who is 77, hasn’t had a show in five years. Recently we’ve had Richard Pousette-Dart, Kenneth Noland and Louise Nevelson, great artists from the 60s and 70s who are now being rediscovered. We are excited about a lot of different things.

LUX: Do you think art has replaced literature and music as the primary mode of cultural information?
MG: I wouldn’t count out music or literature. The most ancient art form is music; it pre-dates language. Historically, I think visual art sits somewhere between music and literature but it’s having its moment right now. We are in a visual society.

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