Art, VR, AI and Blockchain

What will art look like in 20 years?

The future may be uncertain, but some things are undeniable: climate change, shifting demographics, geopolitics.  The only guarantee is that there will be changes, both wonderful and terrible. It’s worth considering how artists will respond to these changes, as well as what purpose art serves, now and in the future.

Nine of the 10 most expensive paintings ever sold were made between 1892 and 1955, the only exception being a newly discovered Leonardo da Vinci from between 1490 and 1519, which fetched an extraordinary $450.3m at auction, making it the most expensive artwork ever sold. Every painting on the list was made by a white man, however, which doesn’t paint a very hopeful picture for equality. In the year 2040, art might not look like art (unless it’s a painting), but it will look like everything else, reflecting zeitgeists as multitudinous and diverse as the artists themselves.

Art clearly has a future that will continue to branch into new forms, including continuing to integrate new technology. Both Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality offer excellent ways to create immersive work, where the viewer can experience the artwork utilizing a headset or phone. Is it just all about money? One of the art market’s greatest challenges for works where the artist is no longer alive is to verify its authenticity and provenance.

In a 2014 report, The Fine Arts Expert Institute (FAEI) in Geneva stated that over 50% of the artworks it had examined were either forged or not attributed to the correct artist. Blockchain could change this. As a public, decentralized list of records that are linked and secured using cryptography, blockchain’s key feature is its fragmented nature. Hosted by millions of computers simultaneously, no centralized version of the information exists for a hacker to access or corrupt. Thus blockchain is currently believed to be the most secure way to transfer digital data. Blockchain’s capacity to track and verify authenticity through timestamps on transactions and cryptographic signatures can solve that problem.

KATYA ZVEREVA, artist, NYC/LA https://www.instagram.com/katyazvereva

CHRISTINA STEINBRECHER-PFANDT, Blockchain.art

https://www.linkedin.com/.../christina-steinbrecher...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Steinbrecher-Pfandt

KING LI & GIOVANNA SUN, https://www.artpot.net/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/giovannasun

MANANA SAMUSEVA, iLIFT TV, BuroHQ, CryptoHQ, Women in Venture

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mananasamuseva