Interview with Trevor Paglen, Co-Curator of Art Basel Zero 10

The Perils of Digital Discourse

Can we talk about digital art without commerce?

<h3 dir="ltr">Digital art has existed for nearly a century, but it didn’t really become part of our lives until the 2020s. Although we all knew of Rembrandt, Pollock, Warhol etc., there wasn’t a single digital artist who was a household name until extremely recently. Now, many people can comfortably mention names like Refik Anadol and BEEPLE, and even Sasha Stiles, PAK, and Operator, without having to think too hard. </h3> In many ways, today’s digital art market, and perhaps since I am excluding names like Vera Molnar and Aaron Cohen from this argument, I should call it the new digital art market, is quite nascent. A lot of its denizens are quite young, and are receiving tremendous exposure in spaces that perhaps do not have the infrastructure for meaningful critical discourse. What’s worse, fame and notoriety on X often fails to translate to the traditional art world, creating two parallel art markets. Social media does not quite function the way the physical world does when it comes to contemporary art, and the rules of the internet require a different set of skills than that of the physical. I often struggle with the fact that Twitter, or now X, is the primary space for conversations on, or about, digital art. It has been thoroughly distorted since Elon Musk’s acquisition in 2022, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/17/24298669/musk-trump-endorsement-x-boosting-republican-posts-july-algorithm-change?utm_source=chatgpt.com">with the algorithm favouring a very specific set of linguistic signals and content</a>. And yes, you could argue that the traditional art world has a liberal bent, but it doesn’t create literal hierarchies of attention the way algorithmic platforms do. The rules for art-world discourse and visibility on X are wildly different. Is being retweeted by an established artist the same as walking into a gallery opening as said artist’s plus one? Does a blue check translate to being on the guest list, even if you paid for it? The parallels, if they can be drawn, are messy (though anthropologically fascinating). One thing that I come back to often is the language requirements of digital environments, in which artists don’t need to have the vernacular to describe their practice, but they do need to talk within the parameters of the digital art world. To the moon, for example, a common rallying cry for many in the NFT space, is openly about the pursuit of wealth. An artist debuting a work of art with this rallying cry is certainly transparent about their priorities and aspirations. They are also less likely to gain traction with any collector or curator interested in deeper motivations. Unfortunately, digital culture does not allow most artists to simply unveil or exhibit, they have to operate within the parameters of the culture. This means artists on X "drop" their works, a word borrowed from streetwear culture that creates a sense of urgency with the intention of creating demand. A drop is inherently commercial, and while there is nothing wrong with that, when the online landscape requires you to create urgency around the work for it to make a statement, the way in which you might have spoken about it if you simply wanted it to exist, changes radically. The traditional world still views NFTs as largely hype over substance. Digital artists and their communities intentionally attempting to create hype around their work does not help. In fact, I can emphatically say, hype is not the path forward. An art gallery also functions as a commercial space, and can create some semblance of urgency to facilitate sales, but it still manages to host culturally meaningful conversations. But by that analogy, there is no museum space in the digital conversation sphere, where someone isn’t chiming in on a thread trying to peddle their wares, as it were. I suppose the point I am trying to make is, can artists present their works on digital platforms like X without the explicit, or implicit, commercial concern? Does it have to be one big grand bazaar, or is it possible for a museum-like digital space to exist within it? Where are the digital kunsthalles? <h3 dir="ltr">Trolls in the Thread</h3> In the digital wild west, social contracts that govern us in physical environments are largely missing. This tends to dilute critical discourse. A digital commercial setting sometimes allows for interlopers. This is both good, and risky. Conversations are not streamlined and linear the way physical conversations are. Interactions are not finite, and so it is much more difficult to have contained, thoughtful discourse. This of course grants a kind of global accessibility to a conversation that in the physical world people might have missed out on. But a thread on X is often disjointed, cacophonic, can be interjected by tweets ranging from MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN to Here’s how I lost 40lbs using this one clever trick doctors won’t tell you. Or worse, can be littered with trolls intentionally attempting to sabotage a conversation, for no reason other than the fact that we have collectively accepted agents of chaos as part of the digital ecosystem. Say what you will about gallery talks, no one turns into a walking billboard or prevents you from literally listening to the artist by grabbing a megaphone and going on a rant halfway through. The price of this no-gates policy, this flexibility, is navigating a space full of arguments, cynicism, ridicule, self-deprecating language, humour (as a defense mechanism), and anonymity. All of these are manageable if you know your way around social media, but do digital artists have to? When did we decide that digital artists have to either endure, or also be good at, shitposting? There is also something so profoundly performative about the culture of tweeting GM into the ether that is almost cult-like, like a bird call but only for a particular set of birds even though everyone can hear it. Whether or not it is actually an innocent and warm greeting intended to build community matters very little when it is attached to the same discourses that focus, overwhelmingly, on sales and wealth. As I mentioned earlier, the physical art world also has its spoken and unspoken rituals, coded language, and barriers to entry. But I’m concerned that in our quest to make everything and everyone so utterly accessible on social media, we have eroded some cultural safeguards and stripped some of these digital spaces of their possibility for meaningful discussion. The result has been a siloing off of the digital art world. Supported largely by the crypto-community, which the traditional art world avoids, digital artists still do not quite coexist with their traditional counterparts. As accessible as it is, the internet is also maze-like in the way it harbors communities, and social media rarely gives you exactly what you are looking for, instead offering you what it thinks you should look at. Most traditional curators, collectors, and artists, simply do not navigate the internet the same way digital artists do. I have no clue how to enter some of these conversations around digital art on X, despite being very much in it, and I can only imagine how difficult it must be for everyone else. For artists daring to venture into any social media beyond Instagram, there is also a language barrier that comes from the required performance of having to cynically put down your own practice before posting about it. The existence of algorithmic digital intermediaries, the extreme accessibility of conversations, the commercially-minded languages around digital art, as well as online culture in general, all contribute to the chasm between the traditional art world and digital art. So how do we bridge this divide? To answer this thorny question, I have decided to interview some friends on how they navigate the digital art world today. Stick around for The Cache № 8.

August 28, 2025 May 3, 2024

How to price digital art?

In the unregulated art market, pricing isn’t a formula—it’s a negotiation.

The art market is one of the largest unregulated markets on the planet. While this means that galleries can sell artworks at staggering figures without exemption, it also creates an uneven playing field where pricing can become a tricky gamble. I was told at a young age by one of the first galleries I’ve worked with that the base price for any artwork should be the cost of production multiplied by five. This rough math ensured that production was recouped. The gallery would presumably take 50%, as is the industry standard. What most people wandering around art fairs don’t realize is that this means for a $10,000 sculpture, for example, the artist must have spent $2000 on production, and receives $5000, meaning a net gain of $3000, one third of the list price. In order to both sustain their lives and to continue to create work, this means that artists either have to sell many works in one presentation, or raise their prices high enough to be able to afford rent and materials. Now this math makes sense in the analogue art world where time cost is harder to pin down as it is not the primary source material. With digital art, pricing is inherently more difficult. In the absence of hardware attached to the presentation, how do we calculate how much the work cost to produce for an artist? If they used an AI tool, do we simply take the monthly subscription cost of the tool as the base cost? By that logic, should one of my AI works cost $300, since I pay $60 per month for Midjourney? Or since I color correct on Photoshop, which is a $19 subscription, can I round it up to an even $400? Because by that logic, I should be selling 150 works every year just to make $60,000, before taxes. Or do I divide the subscription fees by the amount of pieces I make? No matter how you configure it, unless you’re working on a series like Bored Apes, where the point is to have serialised, high volume work, the math doesn’t quite add up with digital art. This is where the cost of an artist’s time, and their credentials come into play. A traditional gallery showcasing a traditional artist may find it easier to justify simply adding another zero or two to the price tag once that artist gets acquired by a museum, but in the absence of such institutional validation (yet), how do we calculate the price of digital artworks? I asked my friend and former Christie’s Digital Art Sales Manager Sebastian Sanchez for his input on their methodology: <blockquote> Digital art pricing is built around three main inputs. First is the artist’s use of technology and conceptual rigor. Collectors tend to place greater value on artists who treat tools such as generative algorithms or AI not simply as effects or production shortcuts, but as core components of their artistic language and conceptual ideas. Depth of experimentation, originality of process, and a sustained commitment to the medium often translate into higher valuations over time. Second is verifiable provenance and market history, since blockchain enables transparent tracking of past sales and ownership across platforms. Third is community and cultural relevance, where active collector bases and curatorial dialogue help establish credibility and long-term demand. </blockquote> Sanchez’s comment suggests collectors play a big role in determining pricing, but depth of experimentation and originality are nebulous metrics that could also apply to any contemporary work of art. Sustained commitment, however, is quite universally respected and this is where artists can benefit from having an active online presence. None of these provide a clear cut mathematical formula that traditional emerging artists can benefit from, but observing the existing market and speaking with experts in the field is a solid starting point for determining one’s price bracket, at least early on. But the digital landscape is filled with people, all of whom have many, often dissenting, and sometimes misinformed opinions. The community Sanchez refers to contains the people who respond GM back to you on X. The <a title="Digital Art and Social Media" href="https://taex.com/news/75" target="_blank" rel="noopener">limiting and possibly diluting impact of social media aside</a>, digital communities orbiting artists online are often governed by fandom. Audience participation with online content is limited to a 3-sentence reaction, a like, or a dislike. There is very little room for useful, meaningful critical feedback, and frankly, the systems are not designed for it. So a digital artist selling on the blockchain would benefit from tuning out the noise–even if it is celebratory–and focusing on observing their landscape and their neighbors when determining their prices. It is also critical to remember that having a large following may result in higher prices than an emerging digital artist who doesn’t tweet, but this does not make one’s art superior. <h3 dir="ltr">It may be tempting to get caught up in the frantic high-speed rail chase that is selling art on the blockchain, with each subsequent trade adding to one’s perceived value. Rapid sales are neither an indicator of lasting value, nor a solid foundation for sustainable pricing practices. </h3> Collectors, just as much as galleries and artists, are complicit in raising (or lowering) an artist’s prices. Sustained growth, as well as lasting cultural and commercial value in the art world come from appreciation over time. <img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/taex-storage-prod/news/upload-1846619982.jpg" alt=" ALKAN AVCIOGLU, Liquid Modernity" width="857" height="564"> Alkan Avcioğlu, Liquid Modernity, 2024, Image: Christie's The landscape is still too nascent for us to have blanket solutions for the digital art market’s pacing and its corrosive impact. Regardless of community size or background, the market does not usually forgive price inflation and there is nothing worse for an artist than for their prices to suddenly go down, a painful signal to all those watching that their output was overvalued or is no longer desirable. There are few cross-market reference points where the art world collectively acknowledges benchmarks, and <a title="Christie's Augmented Intelligence" href="https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/augmented-intelligence/lots/3837" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the Augment Intelligence auction</a> hosted at Christie’s in 2025 is one such milestone. But auction houses usually have years if not decades or centuries of valuation data to base their pricing estimates off of. They also have the advantage of name recognition when selling an artwork. In the absence of such histories and context, I asked Sanchez what criteria they used for pricing works for the Augmented Intelligence auction: <blockquote> We selected artists with sustained practices working with machine learning and computational systems, ranging from pioneers like Harold Cohen to contemporary artists currently advancing the field. Conceptual strength, technical innovation, and historical relevance guided pricing decisions. The exhibition spanned multiple Christie’s galleries and showcased a range of mediums including paintings, sculptures, prints, interactive works, and live robotic painting. The goal was to present AI art as a serious collecting category with broad artistic scope. </blockquote> Adding that the results exceeded its low estimate and settled around the mid estimate overall, Sanchez mentioned that the auction generated significant global attention and strengthened institutional and collector confidence in AI art, reinforcing its long-term position within the contemporary art market. Christie’s has since shuttered the dedicated Digital Art department, absorbing digital art into its 20th and 21st century art sales. Whether this is a sign in their confidence that digital art is simply an extension of contemporary art and merits being presented in its broader context, time will tell.

February 19, 2026 May 3, 2024

Interview with Trevor Paglen, Co-Curator of Art Basel Zero 10

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