{"id":92809,"date":"2026-06-26T18:07:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T18:07:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/92809\/"},"modified":"2026-06-26T18:07:17","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T18:07:17","slug":"comment-art-basels-zero-10-grows-up-and-outgrows-the-digital-community-that-led-to-its-inception-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/92809\/","title":{"rendered":"Comment | Art Basel\u2019s Zero 10 grows up and outgrows the digital community that led to its inception – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Art Basel\u2019s digital art sector Zero10 made its Swiss debut last week in the Messeplatz in Basel, across the street from the fair\u2019s somewhat overstuffed Unlimited sector<\/a> for large-scale art. Titled The Condition, it was co-curated by Eli Scheinman (who curated the previous iterations at Art Basel Miami Beach<\/a> in 2025 and Art Basel Hong Kong<\/a> in March), and the artist Trevor Paglen<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With 20 exhibitors, it was the largest edition of Zero 10 to date and showcased several historical presentations<\/a>, so much so that I have accidentally called it \u201cThe Context\u201d on multiple occasions. Upon arrival, visitors were greeted by a triptych of John Gerrard\u2019s Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) (2017), Flare (Oceania) (2022) and STANDARD (2023) shown side by side for the first time, by the gallery Fellowship<\/a>. Without a doubt the strongest presentation in this Zero 10, the work is emotionally grounded, well installed and thoughtfully representative of the zeitgeist, begging the question: is this the opposite end of the digital art spectrum from Beeple\u2019s Miami spectacle<\/a>? Do these works exist on the same spectrum at all?<\/p>\n

Versions of those questions lingered throughout Zero 10, which was palpably preoccupied with gravitas. There was also an undercurrent of internal tension throughout the sector, with multiple participants and Paglen distancing themselves from prompt-based visual art in favour of more elaborate or code-based art, hinting at a sense of growing hierarchy within digital art.<\/p>\n

The Toronto-based artist 0xDEAFBEEF presented steampunk-adjacent, hand-welded oscilloscopes alongside more traditional digital works, with Asprey Studio<\/a>. During Artmeta\u2019s Digital Art Summit<\/a> in Basel on 15 June, he had dismissed prompt-generated visuals on the grounds that there was no precedent for prompt-based image-making in art\u2014overlooking Sol Lewitt, John Cage, Yoko Ono and a whole slew of conceptual and Fluxus artists. His oscilloscopes are homages to the mathematician and artist Ben Laposky (1914-2000), whose own oscilloscope-made prints were shown on the stand\u2019s walls. This type of overt historical grounding was employed by several Zero 10 exhibitors to highlight\u2014or perhaps legitimise\u2014the digital presentations.<\/p>\n

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Visitors in the Zero 10 sector at Art Basel Courtesy Art Basel<\/p>\n

Given the art-world establishment\u2019s enduring scepticism toward digital art, the curators and exhibitors of Zero 10\u2019s Basel edition could be forgiven for this overcorrection. However, the attempts at historical grounding sometimes veered too far into the academic, as in the case of Oniris<\/a> and Interface Gallery<\/a>‘s stand of works by Vera Molnar. While the installation featured some glorious works by the pioneering Hungarian artist, they were presented in a fashion so academic that it felt out of place in an art fair setting. Similarly, ArtMeta<\/a>\u2019s overpacked exhibition-within-an-exhibition, Digital Masterpieces: From Code to Canon, was filled with extraordinary works, including pieces by Charles Csuri and Ken Knowlton. ArtMeta artistic director Georg Bak\u2019s enthusiasm alone is sufficient to shift one\u2019s perspective on digital art, but the presentation\u2019s busy curation and scholarly tone clashed with some of the more conventionally curated stands in the sector, making it accessible to those in the know but perhaps intimidating for newcomers unsure of where to begin.<\/p>\n

One of the best parts of Paglen and Scheinman\u2019s Zero 10 was the juxtaposition of Gazelli Art House<\/a>\u2019s delicious survey of Harold Cohen, with the works by French artist William Mapan presented by Art Blocks<\/a>. Mapan\u2019s warm and abstract generative works are clearly a spiritual successor to Cohen\u2019s generative works, although the inclusion of Mapan\u2019s plotter generating made-to-order works on site did give me pause. Too often, work created with artificial intelligence (AI) is misperceived as not requiring labour, with audiences asking to see prompts, codes and references to assuage their suspicions. Making the production process transparent\u2014as the curator Christiane Paul did for the Whitney Museum of American Art\u2019s Cohen retrospective in 2023<\/a>\u2014can be enlightening. But in an art fair context, demonstrating an artist\u2019s process can come off as either illuminating or pre-emptively defensive, depending on your preconceptions.<\/p>\n

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Works by Harold Cohen on display in the Gazzeli Art House stand at Zero 10 in Art Basel Courtesy Art Basel<\/p>\n

For a contemporary art audience perhaps unfamiliar with Cohen and Mapan, seeing their works side by side was an excellent opportunity to re-contextualise contemporary AI-driven practices with historical grounding. It was also a gentle reminder from Scheinman and Paglen that digital art has a rich history and the present moment (The Condition of their title) is a result of all that came before it.<\/p>\n

Spr\u00fcth Magers<\/a>\u2019s Zero 10 presentation of the towering Andreas Gursky<\/a> photograph Ocean V (2010) turned out to be a missed opportunity to improve what Paglen referred to as the “antagonistic relationship” between digital galleries and traditional Basel exhibitors. Throughout the fair\u2019s run, the work mostly stood alone, without anyone from the gallery to explain how Gursky\u2019s digital processes fit into the larger story of digital art. Though Paglen had been quite thoughtful in expanding the context of Zero 10 to include artists working with digital processes, this monumental Gursky (arguably more befitting of the Unlimited sector) ended up serving as a reminder of some top-tier galleries\u2019 apparent disinterest in this more expansive definition of digital art.<\/p>\n

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Leander Herzog’s Infinite Garden (2025-26) in the Nguyen Wahed stand at Art Basel’s Zero 10 sector Courtesy Art Basel<\/p>\n

The inclusion of art historical works and photography did prompt interesting questions about what Zero 10 might become. If all art that includes digital processes can be a part of this conversation, the spotlight will likely move away from crypto art and its supporters. While discussing this at Basel Social Club<\/a>, a young fairgoer sporting a cap that read \u201cINTERNET\u201d dismissed this edition of Zero 10 as empty and lacking anything exciting. Neither entertainment nor shock value was at the sector’s forefront in Basel, especially compared to its Miami Beach debut\u2014no gimmicky presentation eclipsed all other conversations. Am I alone in considering this a welcome development?<\/p>\n

A schism was perhaps inevitable when a community that has largely denied, dismissed or ignored the existence of historical digital art was placed within a context that stretches back more than a half-century. This Zero 10 still included NFTs (non-fungible tokens), with Gazelli offering Cohen\u2019s works with accompanying NFT certificates, while the New York gallery Nguyen Wahed<\/a> presented an ever-growing garden on the blockchain created by Leander Herzog. As the only overtly Web3 project on site, Infinite Garden (2025-26) leveraged the blockchain itself as a medium, which was a smart tactic to draw a wider share of fairgoers who may still be crypto-averse.<\/p>\n

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A digitally manipulated photo by Thomas Ruff, presented by David Zwirner, in the Unlimited sector of Art Basel Courtesy Art Basel<\/p>\n

Over the course of last week\u2019s fairs in Basel, attendees were repeatedly overheard debating whether Zero 10 should have been distributed within the Unlimited sector, which itself included several compelling works matching Paglen\u2019s curatorial criteria for art made with digital processes. The galleries Magician Space<\/a> and Soci\u00e9t\u00e9<\/a>, for instance, showcased Timur Si-Qin\u2019s Mariposita, which consisted of an LED screen on the floor displaying a pond in the Amazon, with a steel sculpture based on a 3D scan of a tree taken at the same site installed atop it. A kind of futuristic, eco-conscious and contemplative homage to Charles Ray, with a splash of Caravaggio\u2019s Narcissus (1597-99) thrown in for good measure\u2014as visitors bent forward to behold the pond that did not offer them their own reflection\u2014it was the most overtly digital work presented in Unlimited.Also on view was Thomas Ruff\u2019s haunting series of digitally altered found photos of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, presented by David Zwirner<\/a>. And Dirimart<\/a>\u2019s presentation of Inci Eviner\u2019s breathtaking double-sided, 10m-wide video piece Reenactment of Heaven (2018) could also fit neatly into this expansive category.<\/p>\n

With room to breathe, thoughtful presentations and historical heft aplenty, Zero 10\u2019s Basel edition represented a leap forward for the sector. Its success may have even inadvertently made a case for its own obsolescence or absorption into Basel\u2019s pre-existing sectors\u2014a future iteration of Zero 10 could, for instance, resemble Art Basel\u2019s Kabinett sector of discrete capsule exhibitions within traditional fair stands.<\/p>\n

One note of caution for such an approach would be to consider what happened at Christie\u2019s after the auction house\u2019s digital art department was absorbed into the broader 21st-century art category in 2025\u2014the firm\u2019s recent spring auctions in New York did not feature any digital works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Basel\u2019s digital art sector Zero10 made its Swiss debut last week in the Messeplatz in Basel, across…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8],"tags":[1377,43250,1476,77,20049,789],"class_list":["post-92809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basel","tag-art-basel","tag-art-basel-2026","tag-art-fairs","tag-basel","tag-digital-art","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116817746937983723","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92809","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=92809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}