LACMA Gets Serious About Digital Art
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| DOKU (created by Lu Yang), DOKU the Creator – Concept Void #016 [an NFT], 2025 © DOKU, courtesy of the artist |
A group of LACMA supporters have promised more than 200 works of digital art to the museum. The objects and code range from the mid 20th century to the present and include works made using artificial intelligence. The press release quotes Michael Govan: "Digital art belongs within the long arc of art history, not apart from it."
It's hard to evaluate the gift, as only three images are supplied, and few of the artists are widely known (Refik Anadol, Vera Molnár, and Bored Ape Yacht Club are among the most prominent). Shown above is an NFT by DOKU [avatar of Lu Yang], whose sensibility is somewhere between illustration and slop. Asking whether this is art may be as pointless as asking whether Henry Fox Talbot's photographs of lace are. Posterity (if any) will be curious about human reactions to the AI juggernaut. Collecting digital art now is like building a photography collection directly from Talbot, Daguerre, and Bayard.
Comments
> within the long arc
> of art history, not
> apart from it."
In the meantime, the Ahmanson Foundation and what should be on display in the Price/Goff building remain apart from LACMA. And certain outdoor sculptures and paintings/objects remain apart from the Geffen and the area around it. And how much of what's now in storage will soon be in Las Vegas?
Too bad the museum on Wilshire Blvd isn't so professionally managed and Louvre-Met-type sophisticated, it's hard trying to second guess it.
Shane Reiner-Roth, archpaper .com
The ground floor of the Grand LA, Frank Gehry’s mixed-use complex across the street from his Walt Disney Concert Hall, remains generally lifeless despite its downtown location.... I joined an orderly line of people waiting to see what DATALAND, “the world’s first Museum of AI Arts,” was all about.
...Artificial intelligence is capable of many things, but its interpretations of the planet and its life systems are indeed better thought of as “dreams” than as instructions.
...The only exit is through the gift shop, where I tapped my bracelet beneath a tablet...as it retraced my every step in a floor plan. I was the most still in the Infinity Room, it tells me, and I was most moved by the Data Pavilion. It didn’t mention where I was the most incredulous, but it was in the gift shop, where Nature was decidedly no longer the supposed artistic driver, and I was instead given the opportunity to buy a shirt with my unique data from that day abstracted across the chest.