DIGITAL ART The New El Dorado

Non-Fungible Tokens. Quite a mouthful? Well, it’s beginning to reshape the art market. And as more people invest in the idea of a new digital ecosystem, the rest of the world may follow

- Titlee Sen

Everybody knows the extent to which the digital mode has permeated the whole canvas of art. But there are two distinct realms in which this canvas is being filled with color, form, detail and ways of seeing. At one end is the art itself. And at the other is the market—that is, the artist as a real-world agent who sells his or her art, and the rest of us, the seeing eye, the buyer and collector and dealer…a whole circuitry that’s evolving into quite a masterpiece in itself.

First, the art. Take the palette-full of digital artists out there, making tonnes of money with tech-fuelled art tools. Then pass through the next looking glass—robots that can paint better than humans. Deep-learning AI systems can now study the inner processes of a long-gone master—say, a Da Vinci, or a Rembrandt. The visual stimuli they responded to, the way they thought about color and detail, the precise angles at which the brush moved—in short, the whole package that gave us a master and his unique mode of revisualising the real world. Such systems can use available cues and, say, restore an unseen Rembrandt! Re-enact—or, in the case of tools that do fresh masterpieces—create a whole way of seeing.