By Marleen Kaesebier<\/p>\n
BASEL, Switzerland, June 18 (Reuters) – Art Basel, the world’s biggest art fair, is this year embracing digital art with a new exhibition, betting that the market \u200cis set to take off.<\/p>\n
Digital art can encompass everything from work on screens and \u200cvideos to paintings created with computer technology, including from Photoshop, coding and even artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
Dubbed Zero 10, the exhibition across \u200bthe street from the fair’s paintings and sculptures comes to the home of Art Basel for the first time after it premiered in Miami last December.<\/p>\n
Art Basel chief executive Noah Horowitz said the appeal of digital art was a natural bet for the future with a younger generation of people \u200ccoming of age on screens.<\/p>\n
“A lot \u2060of what that generation is going to be attracted to collecting and acquiring are going to be objects and things that speak that language,” Horowitz told \u2060Reuters.<\/p>\n
Sales of digital art made up only 3% of the $59.6 billion worth of global art sales last year, but that was up from just 1% in 2024, according to the Art Basel & UBS Global \u200bArt Market \u200bReport 2026.<\/p>\n
UBS art adviser Eric Landolt said that reflected \u200bgrowing interest not just from millennial \u200cand Gen Z buyers, but also from seasoned collectors and institutions.<\/p>\n
‘IT’S JUST LANGUAGE’<\/p>\n
William Mapan, a French artist who created paintings over two years through meticulous coding, said for the first decade, no one took an interest in his digital art. At Tuesday’s opening, his work sold out in the first hour.<\/p>\n
“People usually say painting and coding are completely separate disciplines but it depends on the \u200cway you see it. It’s just language – painting is a \u200blanguage, coding is a language, and you can make \u200ba third new language in between,” he \u200bsaid.<\/p>\n
Still, there are concerns that digital art is exposed to technology that is \u200cconstantly evolving.<\/p>\n
“You might have digital formats that \u200bexist now, but how \u200bdo you ensure they work in future too?” said Landolt.<\/p>\n
Alejandro Cartagena, co-founder of Fellowship, a gallery which sold a $500,000 piece of digital art by john gerrard at Zero 10, said \u200bthat risk was being factored \u200cin.<\/p>\n
“Every collector has a breakdown of exactly what it needs to have this run \u200bforever,” he said. “We’re very committed to the conservation of the works.”<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Marleen Kaesebier \u200bin BaselEditing by Dave Graham and Gareth Jones)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Marleen Kaesebier BASEL, Switzerland, June 18 (Reuters) – Art Basel, the world’s biggest art fair, is this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8],"tags":[1377,14499,77,20049,44393,5529],"class_list":["post-87197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basel","tag-art-basel","tag-art-fair","tag-basel","tag-digital-art","tag-eric-landolt","tag-noah-horowitz"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116773190680399506","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}