Art in the Digital Age

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Last year, the artist known as “Beeple” sold a digital collage online at Christie’s auction house for almost $70 million dollars. With the image came an NFT, or non-fungible token, a digital certificate of authenticity to protect the buyer. Now Beeple is planning a museum of digital art in Charleston, SC, part of a trend of digital transformation in the “Metaverse” (loosely, “an embodied virtual-reality experience”). From its more industrial origins – gaming, fashion – the phenomenon of the Metaverse has now entered the cultural realm, with implications for museums, works of art, and the sales and marketing of virtual art objects via cryptocurrency in the Blockchain. The situation raises critical questions about the very nature of art in the Digital Age, how it is made, what it looks like, how it is bought, paid for, and viewed by collectors and investors. Is this trend just a fad and already a bust? Does digitizing art and selling rights to it democratize access to art, as has been claimed, or are baser intentions in play? With the participation of a digital artist, a business director for NFT projects at an auction house, a curator, and more, the class will explore these issues in depth. For more information about this and other courses in the Department of Art and Art History, please visit https://art.georgetown.edu This course is not available to audit.