STEPPING OUT of the warm morning sun in dusty Marfa, Texas, I am on a tour of big, physical, Minimalist sculptures with a small, unlikely group of digital artists and enthusiasts. In the middle of the 340 acres of desert that host the collection of the Chinati Foundation, I have found a five-inch span of floor that feels like evidence of magic.
About two-thirds of the people in my packed tour group have, like me, traveled to Marfa for a weekend-long generative art festival organized by the NFT platform Art Blocks, and are taking a break from the festival’s scheduled programming to visit this Minimalist mecca. We have arrived at Donald Judd’s magnum opus, his 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, 1982–86. One of the work’s components is noticeably askew, having rotated off the rigid grid that organizes the other ninety-nine. I wonder what sort of violence might have caused this aberration. Was there a fight? Did a careless reveler drunkenly bump into it at a fundraising soirée? Was it deliberately rammed as part of a political protest against Big Oil or a problematic funder?
Not quite. Each morning the desert sun rises and begins transforming each surface of each sculpture—all of them manufactured to identical specifications of thickness and finish—into something unique and unpredictable: a sheet of blinding glare; a hazy reflection of dirt, sky, and mountain; a mysterious well of shadow. The specific optical effect is dependent upon the variables of the sun’s position in the sky and the position of a given sculpture in the gallery. But the energy of the desert, it turns out, catalyzes another transformation beneath the artwork’s surface. The particular sculpture I’ve been pondering is partly shielded from the sun’s rays by the shadow of a concrete column. As a result, each day the heat of the desert warms only its southeast corner, causing that corner to expand imperceptibly while the rest of it remains in the shade. In the evening, the corner that has been fully engaged by the desert sun cools and drags the comparatively inert portion of the sculpture toward it. More than thirty-eight years after the pieces were installed, five inches is the sum effect of this uneven engagement with the world outside the gallery windows.
I hadn’t noticed this phenomenon the last time I stood in front of these sculptures, in 2021, when I was attending the first ever Art Blocks Marfa Weekend, but it stuck in my mind as I reflected on this past November’s edition. In 2021, the generative art platform had been founded only one year earlier, just as the NFT market was approaching its speculative peak. The event seemed then, and perhaps still does seem, an odd pairing of people and place. An unflattering piece about that first weekend in the New Yorker described a neophyte group of crypto enthusiasts out of step with the aesthetic and ideological values of the art world in general and the Chinati community in particular. Beyond the apparent differences between these spheres—digital versus material; explicit free-market maximalism versus avowed anti-commercialism—the very premise of the event seemed like a contradiction. There in the rough, arid desert was a group of two hundred artists, collectors, and boosters who had spent the previous year extolling the merits of an immaterial online art form, now giving up chat windows and custom emoji to talk through chapped lips and dusty eyelashes.
Four years later they’re still coming here, in even greater numbers (the 2024 edition brought 550 visitors), though they themselves have changed. Some of these changes are quick pivots, obvious and deliberate, like the kind you’d hear described by a tech CEO in a strategy meeting. But some of them are slow pivots, like the one I saw in Judd’s sculpture—a buildup of imperceptibly small responses to the conditions of a big, unpredictable world outside.
One of the most underappreciated quirks of Digital Art’s NFT Class of 2021 was its relative diversity of educational profiles and political leanings. Unlike in most other professionalized art scenes I’ve encountered, most of the artists here don’t hold MFA degrees. And over the past four years, NFT art events have been the only ones where attendees seem nearly equally likely to vote Republican as Democrat. (I will note, however, that I strangely never heard the word Trump even once in my three days in Marfa this past November, despite the event taking place only ten days after the election.) I always valued this weird heterogeneity despite the fact that it seemed to discomfit the more mainstream art world, or perhaps partially because of that.
As for other forms of diversity, I also saw significantly more women in attendance than there were four years ago. Coinciding with this shift are concerted efforts by the Art Blocks platform to include more women in both its artistic programming and staffing.
Looking at the schedule of exhibitions and events, it is also apparent that the community’s range of interests has expanded. The most popular exhibition of the weekend was at Glitch Gallery, which featured not generative art but the excellent, meticulously constructed video art of Joe Pease. The exhibition’s opening was punctuated with a live performance featuring an actor costumed as the stressed-out white-collar everyman who often stars in Pease’s work. In another well-received performance piece, by the artist OONA, participants donned “milkable” breast prostheses as their heart rates were recorded and translated into digital scribbles.
But the clearest contrast between the event this past November and the scene four years ago was the embrace of the physical object. Everywhere, there were site-specific installations and handcrafted goods. On Marfa’s main strip, Art Blocks presented a group show highlighting the platform’s most recent “curated” release (this designation is reserved for artworks that the Art Blocks curatorial committee considers “foundational”), which includes physical artworks for the first time in the platform’s history. Among these were four pieces that look like lanterns, each with a stained wooden base and top about a foot square and frosted acrylic walls twice as tall. They were manufactured by the artist Michael Kozlowski, aka MPKoz, who also wrote the algorithm that generates unique cut patterns for the wavy plastic baffles on each side.
The clearest contrast between the event this past November and the scene four years ago was the embrace of the physical object.
Some of this shift in the generative art community’s interests could be attributed to its exposure to a precipitously chilled market. Put simply: Nobody is getting rich on generative digital art anymore, so maybe generative art fans have simply switched to a new product category. But this cynical read feels too easy. For me, I see this turn toward the physical alongside those other small shifts—the engagement with traditional performance, video, and new media practices; interest in conservation techniques; active gender inclusivity—as evidence of a different kind of exposure.
Many among the Art Blocks Marfa Weekend attendees have shouldered their way into a place in the broader art landscape. Artists whose careers were launched on Art Blocks just four years ago now find themselves collected or exhibited in major museums such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Art Blocks boosters have formalized influential relationships with major art institutions too. After the weekend ended, Art Blocks founder Erick Calderon would head to New York’s Museum of Modern Art to see a piece from his own personal collection, by Dutch artist Rafael Rozendaal, on display in the museum’s garden lobby. New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art recently appointed omnipresent NFT collector Benny Gross to its digital art acquisition committee. Ignore the market; in most other ways, this movement is having its moment in the sun.
On Saturday morning, I attended a panel discussion featuring Simon Hudson, the cofounder of the decentralized autonomous art project called BottoDAO. I’d met him for the first time on the previous day’s tour, where he spoke effusively and eloquently on those Judd sculptures in the desert. Responding to a question, Hudson cited the recent Harold Cohen retrospective at the Whitney when pointing out that what we today call “procedural generative art” was called “artificial intelligence” decades ago. The technique of shaping algorithms toward artistic ends is, he notes, a common thread from which any number of sub-practices in the fields of art and technology have evolved.
Algorithmic logic is not just a broadly applicable technique for creating art, but also a broadly applicable intellectual model for thinking about other kinds of art, from the hard-edge Op art paintings of Victor Vasarely to the instruction-based performances coded in Yoko Ono’s 1964 Grapefruit. Many of the “Artist Activations” presented during Art Blocks Marfa Weekend put generative art principles in conversation with other art practices. The artist remnynt set up a booth where participants followed a set of pseudo-random prompts to create a sort of elementary-school Jackson Pollock acrylic painting. Maya Man conducted fortune-telling sessions through an artist-designed version of MASH, the children’s game where you iterate through a finite array of possible outcomes to predict someone’s future.
Driving away from Marfa on Sunday morning, I thought about another thing that Hudson had mentioned. The AI agent that he and BottoDAO have molded into the autonomous artistBotto is impossibly powerful. Though it is part of a lineage of generative art, it braids so many algorithms so densely that the technological aspect of the project is basically opaque to me. But on that morning, he said that the true innovation in his project is not the algorithms that spit out thousands of images daily, but rather the layer of human coordination that he’s built to harness those algorithms. It occurred to me that what the Art Blocks platform has created, after the crazy money has left and the interests of its audience have expanded, is a common surface area, composed of an unlikely audience, that captures exposure to art. I thought about those five inches that Donald Judd’s sculpture wandered over thirty-eight years, and I wondered what other transformations might be engendered by this strange energy in the desert.
Mitchell F. Chan is an artist based in Toronto.
