What will art look like in the future

Ultimately, Kay and her colleagues envision a day in which design teams across the world can simultaneously tour their sketches in VR, walking around and chatting within the drawing — the ultimate form of creative collaboration. Woods Bagot is at the forefront of a revolution sweeping the world of art and design — new technologies like VR, Artificial Intelligence and video-enabled digital whiteboards changing how artists collaborate across the globe.

Fundamentally, these technologies are reshaping the artistic process at each phase: ideation, creation and launch. From teams of architects using digital whiteboards to design buildings to artists videoconferencing with marine biologists to save ecosystems to musicians partnering with programmers to create immersive worlds in VR, technology is powering creativity at the highest level — resulting in groundbreaking new forms of art.

The first part of the creative process is also often the hardest — the ideation phase. Starting from a vague initial inspiration, artists must then work to build a solid idea, often brainstorming with colleagues to develop a course of action — a process increasingly being aided by technology.

Through rising mediums like 3D printing, VR and video conferencing digital whiteboards, artists can push themselves to define ideas, exploring various options with models, virtual designs and group conferencing, broadening and furthering the discovery process. Once an idea is finalized, the artist now begins the true work — the creation process.

The phase in which artists work daily to craft their projects, the creation process has historically been a slow, labor- intensive procedure, artists chiseling stone by hand, tearing through drafts or physically building models to test prototypes, only able to measure their progress by their resulting rounds of physical work. Since making statements in solidarity, cultural organisations have begun to make real change.

We will undoubtedly see more important anti-racism interventions through exhibitions, collaborations and commissions.

Similarly, the British Museum removed a statue of its slave-owning founder, Hans Sloane from a prominent pedestal; instead, it has been placed in a cabinet alongside artefacts explaining his work in the context of the British empire.

More museums are sure to follow suit. The pandemic has hit the cultural sector hard, putting arts institutions under huge financial strain. To stay afloat, some are turning to deaccessioning — the act of lawfully removing an object from a collection. With the push to decolonise museums, we are also beginning to see institutions selling off high value works to upgrade and diversity their collections.

Local not global Although exhibitions are open again, international travelling shows and art fairs remain paused and postponed. The only guarantee is that there will be changes, both wonderful and terrible.

Artists in the future will wrestle with the possibilities of the post-human and post-Anthropocene — artificial intelligence, human colonies in outer space and potential doom. The identity politics seen in art around the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements will grow as environmentalism, border politics and migration come even more sharply into focus. Instead of thousands, or millions, of likes and followers, we will be starved for authenticity and connection.

Art could, in turn, become more collective and experiential, rather than individual. I also see it being much more representative of our growing and shifting demographics, so more artists of colour, more female-identified works, and everything in between.

Black abstraction, curating and performance are all centre stage. But it merely means that they will be further embraced by the markets and the institutions, which will themselves become more diverse and informed by histories outside the dominant, Eurocentric, Western canon. But then, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, the world had been turned upside down.

Of new buyers, 60 percent did their business in online sales, and online sales continue to recruit the largest number of new buyers, at around 41 percent. More will be online. More will be private. There will be an active auction market for people who prefer to transact that way. Marc Spiegler, director of Art Basel, said even when the world returns to its in-person ways, he foresees an accelerated shift toward digital promotion.

Online content is important for the auction houses too. The prospect of performance art in the virtual realm may seem at odds with a movement that prizes presence and connection in real time, but it is becoming more and more acceptable—and even appealing—to practitioners and audiences all over.

Opera companies and theatrical endeavors have found success with broadcasts in venues like cinemas for years, and now the genres are expanding as the screens shrink in size. Grubbs knows his way around thinking through the finer points of audience engagement as a poet who often collaborates with Susan Howe and the author of books including Now that the audience is assembled and The Voice in the Headphones.

And he has good company in others who imagine a lasting future for online performance.