The Art World Is In Peril. How Do We Make It Better?

What do we talk about when we talk about the ‘Art World’ in 2025? It definitely doesn’t describe everyone who makes art, or buys art, or goes to a gallery. ‘Art World’ suggests a degree of gatekeeping, and maybe that’s ok. A five-year-old doesn’t become part of the ‘Art World’ the moment their mum sticks a drawing on the fridge – nor does a crypto bro who churns out 10,000 cartoon avatars via an algorithm, some would argue. But then, what does the ‘Art World’ actually describe? What does it do? Who does it work for? Does it help the best, most interesting art rise to the top, and compensate its creators accordingly – can it continue to do that, in a world of rapid technological developments that are changing the face of human creativity? Or does ‘Art World’ deserve its reputation as a dirty word – a symbol of elitism, fraud, corporate greed, and financial speculation? If so, what are the alternatives? 

Last month, many of these questions came to a head in the backlash to an online auction based at Christie’s in New York. The auction aimed to highlight the “breadth and quality of AI art” – a flashpoint in contemporary art world arguments – via works by the likes of Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Grimes, Refik Anadol, and Sasha Stiles, as well as early pioneers of the technology like Harold Cohen. But more than 5,000 self-declared artists signed an open letter calling for Christie’s to cancel the sale, objecting to the use of AI models that “exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them”. 

“Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies’ mass theft of human artists’ work,” the letter continued, making reference to the practice of scraping image databases to train mainstream text-to-image generators like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. However, despite (or because of) the controversy, the auction exceeded expectations when it ended on March 5, raking in $728,784 across 34 lots.

The second most expensive work to come out of the sale – behind Anadol’s ‘ISS Dreams’ – was a print and NFT from Herndon and Dryhurst’s xhairymutantx project. Commissioned for the 2024 Whitney Biennial, the project involved training a text-to-image model on images of Holly, so that any user prompt returned a weird, hybrid version of the artist and musician (you can try it here). The idea? To explore how emerging AI models might be influenced by the content they’re fed, and “to raise questions about the extent of self-determination possible with the internet today”. In the wake of the Christie’s auction, however, these complex ideas were flattened into the same old “AI vs human artists” discourse. “It basically ended up with people using one of our artworks as a symbol to project their fears about AI on, completely out of our control or intentions,” Dryhurst tells Dazed. And, as always: “The loudest and brashest opinions [got] more oxygen.”

Ivona Tau is a Lithuanian artist whose work also featured in the Christie’s auction. She was “frustrated” by the negative reaction, she tells Dazed, due to the widespread misunderstanding of the scope of AI’s artistic applications. “Some [are] mindless and uncreative, yes, but others meaningful and exploratory.” Tau herself used no copyrighted materials to train the AI models involved in her work, having created her own datasets using personal photographs since 2020’s [Un]seen Warsaw. But, she adds: “Even those who use third-party AI tools often do so thoughtfully, integrating them into a broader artistic practice.”

Deep down, Dryhurst suggests, the backlash doesn’t even really stem from the use of AI. “I think most people’s concerns about AI are actually misplaced discontent with the maturation of a platform attention economy that didn’t deliver on its promises,” he says. In other words, while today’s digital platforms shape the polarised conversation around art – after all, “nuanced opinions don’t make for entertaining flare-ups on Instagram” – their failure to deliver a working model for creatives is a big part of the problem itself. For the last decade, Dryhurst and Herndon have been vocal about the dysfunctional dynamics of all art forms under platform capitalism, speaking presciently about streaming service payouts and social media metrics as “a debased way to value art”. The pair also explored viable alternatives to this broken economy as part of their 2024 Serpentine exhibition The Call, which included new protocols and legal structures to help compensate artistic collaborators.

The writer and entrepreneur Yancey Strickler has also been at the vanguard of the conversation about what the art world could, or should, look like for the last few years. In 2009 he was a co-founder of Kickstarter, and Metalabel (“a new operating system for creative work”) followed in 2022. The former, he says, was driven by his belief in work whose value lies beyond the narrow scope of a “corporate boardroom or a major label” – that, even if something is only meaningful to 200 people, it “can be creatively and emotionally significant” and deserves to be financially significant as well. Metalabel’s founding principles follow a similar logic, updated for the new economic models of the Big Tech-powered 2020s. “Number one, to be a creative person today is to be constantly creating content to perform the act of being an artist, which you spend more time doing than you do being the artist,” he explains. “You look everywhere, you can see the burnout.” 

Mainstream social media platforms clearly aren’t the best place to share and view art, anyway. “Social media treat[s] everything as content,” Strickler adds, “a fundraiser for someone whose house burned down, someone’s thirst trap pics for their OnlyFans, my new poem I’m super proud of, an alarming [news] story. And it’s like, alright, go out there and compete. Obviously, it’s the wrong context for creative work.”

If modern tools like social media and AI weren’t designed with artists in mind, though, traditional institutions like galleries and auction houses aren’t always that much better. Strickler discusses this in New Creative Era, his recently-launched podcast with the artist and internet culture researcher Joshua Citarella. The scarcity-based economy of the art world establishment, they suggest, often encourages artists to take a counterintuitive approach to sharing their work. For example, a gallery might hold back perfectly good artworks – at the expense of artists’ “unstable” short-term finances – in order to inflate the value of pieces that have already been sold and boost their collectors’ profiles. 

As Citarella points out, this scarcity mindset is especially nonsensical when it comes to the reproducible forms of media like prints or digital art that proliferate among young and emerging artists today, which aren’t even subject to the material limits of, say, a painting or a sculpture. “Materials are mostly cheap and talent is widespread; therefore, for profits to be made, scarcity has to be produced,” as Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber wrote in 2019. “In the art world, this is what the critical apparatus is largely about: the production of scarcity.”

What does this mean for the artists themselves? Well, for one, it means they’re much less likely to get their work into the hands of the people who might appreciate it most, their true fans, friends, and fellow artists. As Strickler points out, galleries tend to have a tiny customer base of a few “super rich people” – serious collectors who can drop six figures on art over the course of a few years, if only to flip it for profit a few years later. This presents another problem: instead of imagining an audience of people like themselves, artists looking to make a living are incentivised to “backward engineer” their work for “some sketchy rich person who [they] hope to never meet”. Strickler adds: “If you’re making art for one of five people, and thinking, ‘What is the sun room in an Aspen house like?’… that’s a horrifying mindset.”

To be a creative person today is to be constantly creating content to perform the act of being an artist, which you spend more time doing than you do being the artist – Yancey Strickler

There are a few alternatives for contemporary artists, of course. For Tau: “Making a living requires diverse income streams. I’ve sold prints and robot paintings. I’ve sold digital art on the blockchain. I’ve licensed video works for display in hotels and corporate spaces. I’ve collaborated with luxury brands. I’ve taken on private commissions. I’ve given talks and workshops.” The key, she says, is balancing commercial projects while staying true to her creative vision. “This allows me to work on what I want without being entirely dependent on the fluctuations of the traditional art market.”

Similarly, Herndon and Dryhurst have experimented with various ways to value and monetise their art over the last decade, driven by a “medium-agnostic” approach and a willingness to embrace new technologies. “I don’t see art and tech as separate pursuits in the slightest,” Dryhurst explains. “Fundamentally, art is a technology and technology is an art. Many are just stuck in a very 20th century mindset that sees these things as discrete industries rather than fundamental things we all participate in now.”

For all the future-facing innovation in the art world, though, establishment institutions do still serve some important functions. Namely: legitimising artists and distributing their work. Tau, for example, didn’t graduate from an elite art school; her route into the art world came via computer science and machine learning. “For an artist like me – coming from a non-traditional art background – validation from institutions like Christie’s carries particular significance,” she says. On a broader level, a highly-curated environment like a gallery or auction house can also shape our perceptions of art itself, she adds. Amid an explosion in AI art, for example, discussions arising from the Christie’s auction might help differentiate between the people using it as a “lazy way to delegate creativity” and those who approach it as a “deeply considered practice”.

The question is: can’t we just move these conversations elsewhere, without all the downsides of stuffy art institutions or giant tech corporations? And do artists really need 250-year-old auction houses to tell them what their work should be worth, or to battle it out for attentional supremacy in the realm of engagement bait and TikTok slop? There certainly seems to be an appetite for something different. Naturally, Strickler agrees: “I think that we’ve reached a bit of a boiling point, where people are exhausted with the models that currently exist.”

Metalabel – which places more emphasis on the community and context surrounding an artist’s release – is born out of that exhaustion, and takes inspiration from the “collective legitimisation and self-approval” of early punk and hardcore scenes. Facing a reluctant music industry, many of those bands simply went ahead and made their own labels, where they released their own music alongside records by similar artists. “They didn’t wait for anybody to be like, ‘You’re cool.’ They were just like, ‘We’re fucking cool.’ And it worked.” Another example from the music world is the Cindy Lee album Diamond Jubilee. Released in 2024, the record saw the Canadian musician forego the content-dense, highly-competitive world of streaming services and release exclusively to YouTube and the Web 1.0 site Geocities. “It was just a different mindset of how to play the game,” Strickler says, “It wasn’t: ‘How do I gain as much attention as possible within this or that bubble?’ It was: ‘No, I’m way the fuck over here. And who’s gonna show up?’” Again, it worked. Diamond Jubilee was ranked album of the year by Pitchfork, and hit number two on the Guardian’s list. 

In terms of making money (which the art world is notoriously shy about) Metalabel aims to put more choice in the hands of the creatives themselves. Releases can include physical work, digital work, IRL events, or a bundle of all three, with the option to control the price, plus how many pieces or editions can be collected. While this marks a significant move away from galleries manufacturing scarcity around an artist’s work, it also doesn’t fully lean into the decentralised, deregulated dynamics of the NFT boom, where mass-produced artworks were viewed as little more than financial tokens.

I think that we’ve reached a bit of a boiling point, where people are exhausted with the models that currently exist – Yancey Strickler

For Dryhurst, the emergence of new platforms like Metalabel that offer ways to fund, distribute, and support artistic projects – also Subvert, Nina, and Zora – makes him hopeful about the near future of the art world. “I personally still find crypto promising, although its chaos can test patience,” he adds, “as fundamentally it’s a way to price and coordinate activity around your own work, based on terms you set.” And yes, the NFT market did eventually crash a few years back, rendering multimillion-dollar collections essentially worthless – but the hope, echoed by Tau, is that a more legitimate, sustainable marketplace will emerge from the ashes of false hype and financial speculation.

In truth, the future of how art is created, curated, shared, bought, and sold could lie in some mixture of all the above. It’s quite easy to imagine a future, for example, where blockchain technologies provide the financial infrastructure, while artists build their credibility via tight-knit and “self-legitmising” internet platforms. (Dryhurst also singles out community-focused projects like New Models and Do Not Research as a cause for optimism… at risk of sounding self-congratulatory, we’ll add Dazed Club into the mix.) This could also present an interesting opportunity for future curators and archivists, who might sift through Discord channels and group chats to piece together an artist’s ‘lore’ and tell the story behind their work. In an age of prolific AI image generators, after all, the provenance of art and its human backstories are more important than ever.

If they’re done right, in fact, new ownership models, community platforms, economic and legal structures, and protocols for the art world could serve as a blueprint for society at large in the age of AI. As Dryhurst points out, there’s a growing necessity for some kind of roadmap: “We need to be thinking about new economic models in every domain, not just the arts, as these [AI] models are already very capable and show little sign of slowing down.” 

This chimes with Strickler’s belief that we’re “heading toward a future society that will be run and led by creative people” – first, we just need to build the right infrastructure. “There’s never been more artists or creative people in human history,” he says. “There’s never been more people trying to make things. There’s never been more people consuming things, or caring about things.” If we can learn to harness all this creative energy and get the best deal for artists and art lovers alike, we might not just be talking about how to make a better art world any more – we might be on the way to a better world, full stop