Reviewing the reviews

Take an exclusive look at the latest issue of The Week [View this email in your browser]( Dear newsletter reader, We thought you'd appreciate this special preview from the latest issue of The Week magazine, where you’ll find everything you need to know about the most important stories in news, business, technology, and culture. Today's preview comes from Review of Reviews: Arts & Music section. If you like what you read you can [try 6 Risk-Free issues of The Week](. Virtual-reality art: How digital pioneers are moving beyond museums You don't have to look deeply into art in the time of COVID-19 to glimpse a digital revolution, said Charlotte Higgins at The Guardian. This week, the art fair Frieze New York — "the most social, crowded, people-watching-oriented event of the global visual art calendar" — unfolded entirely online. And the shift instantly democratized the fair, creating free access to the work in 200 contemporary art galleries and making the prices of all the art, for once, plain for anyone to see. But at a time when the reopening of major art institutions around the world still seems a distant prospect — "and the idea of the hypercrowded blockbuster show even more so" — even this spring's widespread innovations in the use of the web to display or sell art feel like stopgaps. Suddenly, we live in a world where visual art is being consumed almost exclusively on screens. "So has the moment for digital art arrived?" No prospect could be more exciting, said Daniel Birnbaum at ArtNet. Jeff Koons, Marina Abramovic and other major artists have been discovering the potential of virtual reality and augmented reality, technologies that point to a future in which audiences "engage with art very differently than they do now." Instead of flocking to galleries and museums to gaze upon high-priced objects, they will encounter art where they are. Thanks to augmented reality, "new forms of public art will emerge, available to anyone with a smartphone." An artist can plop a towering virtual sculpture in the middle of Times Square or Grand Central Terminal, as the street artist Kaws recently did in an international project supported by Acute Art, the London-based studio I now head. Similar initiatives will invite viewers to participate in co-producing the project or happening. If the revolution depends on money, it might not occur, said Deborah Vankin at the Los Angeles Times. Collectors drive the art market, and VR art doesn't align with their interests. "How would collectors display VR works in their homes? Are the works originals or part of a limited edition? What's to prevent someone from reproducing or reselling a work made with software and code as opposed to paint and canvas?" There is also an opposite danger that the richest artists and dealers will quickly dominate the scene, given the often high price of entry, said Margaret Carrigan at The Art Newspaper. But Magda Sawon, whose New York gallery Postmasters has been a pioneering force in digital art for a quarter century, urges the underdogs to stop worrying about the advantages of the powerful and start innovating with whatever digital tools they have in hand. "Everyone," she says, "should look to what they can do within their means." [Try 6 Risk-Free issues of The Week]( Copyright © 2020 The Week Publications, Inc, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you signed up for newsletters from The Week. Our mailing address is: The Week Publications, Inc 155 E 44th St Fl 22New York, NY 10017-4100 [Add us to your address book]( Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe from this list](.