After training those artisans, Adams began working as he does to this day, unraveling Islamic prayer rugs and meticulously reweaving them with beads that evoke the zikr or Tasbih strand that Muslims use for prayer. It’s “a symbolic gesture,” he said, a way to make his own space within Islam as a queer mixed-race Muslim, and to consider “the aspects of my identity that were in conflict with each other.” Today Adams employs a team of 16, including his former painting students and their relatives, as well as his own family members, to help him finish sprawling tapestries that have the scale and wall-power of paintings. Several works incorporate worn-out linoleum flooring ripped up from friends’ and neighbors’ houses, a building material associated with working-class homes. His 2022 solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, “Desire Lines,” included the 10-foot-long, earth-toned Langa (2021), made from wood, plastic, glass, stone, nylon rope, wire, and cotton. The beige X across its center is based on an aerial Google Maps image of the footpaths grooved into the land between the Cape Town community of Bonteheuwel, where Adams grew up—designated for “Coloured” people during the apartheid era—and Langa, an adjacent Black suburb.

Recently, many early-career artists trained in fine art have been following a path similar to Adams’s, turning away from painting—along with the art historical baggage and limitations that come with it—and toward fiber. They’re using the materials of craft in ways that look a lot like painting. But these artists take the material as an invitation to center personal and social histories, often from historically marginalized perspectives. Queens, New York–based Natalia Nakazawa, an artist of Japanese and Uruguayan heritage, first trained as a figurative painter at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In critiques and studio visits, she experienced what she called “terrifying” conversations, rife with exoticizing tokenism, about the brown female bodies in her paintings. After exhibiting figurative work at the Queens International in 2006, she “close[d] … that chapter.” Today, she uses textiles to address cultural heritage, diaspora, digital circulation, and institutional power. “One reason why I gravitated toward textiles was to escape obsessive conversations about the body’s particulars,” she said, during a visit to her studio in Long Island City, New York. “I wanted to talk about ancestry, history, past, present, future. I wanted to talk about globalization and markets—how images are translated from one medium to the next and are sold.” A recent textile, Demons and Protectors: Say their names #GuiYingMa #ChristinaYunaLee #MichelleAlyssaGo (2022), features images of three Asian American women who were murdered in New York during the pandemic, alongside images of beasts and fragmented sculptural hands. There is a “fragile quality to how much we can honor and protect our own community members,” Nakazawa said.

Brazilian-born, Los Angeles–based artist Lila de Magalhaes initially studied painting, but turned to embroidery after being introduced to the technique while working as an assistant in a painter’s studio. After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Southern California (where she focused on video art), she worked as a studio assistant for Ivan Morley, and came across his “rickety Japanese analog hand-guided embroidery machine.” The tool took her back to her childhood making crafts as a Waldorf school student in Switzerland, where she was raised. She now makes tapestries that, from a distance, are dead ringers for paintings. Only when you get close enough can you see their otherworldly imagery is embroidered onto dyed bedsheets or silks, and embellished with layers of chalk pastel. Her visual vocabulary— kittens, worms, insects, abstract body parts, and often, a woman riding naked astride a horse—plumbs the unconscious. A self-professed Jungian, she refers to the dyed thrift-store bedlinens she embroiders as “the place of the unconscious and dreams.”

This new generation of artists freely mixes fiber and painting, addressing formal and political concerns in works that are dyed, woven, embroidered, and sewn rather than rendered in oil or acrylic. Indeed, on a trip to galleries in downtown New York this past winter, tapestries often dominated the wall space typically given to painting. One standout show was an intergenerational exhibition at Kaufmann Repetto, “Re-Materialized: The Stuff That Matters.” Millennial artists working in figuration—like LJ Roberts, who makes embroidered portraits of queer and trans individuals; and Erin M. Riley, whose tapestries often depict her own tattooed body, captured in iPhone selfies—were included, along with veterans like 80-year-old knotted-rope artist Françoise Grossen.

The turn from paint to textiles is a trend that has been brewing for a while. The ground was laid by a series of exhibitions that celebrated both craft and the tendency toward ornamentation and decoration, both of which have long been associated with women and non-Western cultures. Nakazawa pointed to recent surveys like “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972–1985,” which opened in 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as influential for celebrating ornament in contemporary art. “A lot of people relegate women and people of color to a decorative realm,” she said; for this reason, she considers the medium of textiles a tool for formerly marginalized people to reclaim full humanity

Other landmark shows foregrounding textiles and craft include “Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present” (2014) at the ICA Boston; “Outliers and American Vanguard Art” (2018) at the National Gallery of Art; “Quilts and Color” (2014) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and “Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019” (2019–22) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Many of these exhibitions build on the legacy of feminist art history by reclaiming contributions to formal innovation created in domestic settings, celebrating collective practices, and leveling the hierarchy between fine art and folk art. In the process, they revealed how gender, race, and class underpin aesthetic biases.

Over two decades, major museum exhibitions have reframed works made in fiber as capital-A Art by showing how formal evolutions in painting developed alongside—and indeed borrowed from—patterns and compositions found in textiles. One touchstone is the groundbreaking survey “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” which traveled to 11 museums between 2002 and 2006. The show’s inventive geometric compositions, made from castoff fabric by a community of Black quilters in Alabama, were eagerly received as a particularly American style of abstraction. As Michael Kimmelman extolled in the New York Times, “Imagine Matisse and Klee … arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South in the form of women, descendants of slaves.”

A new generation of artists’ work testifies to the Gee’s Bend quilters’ enduring influence. The 32-year-old artist Bhasha Chakrabarti, whose work was included in the group show “Fiber of My Being” last summer at Hales gallery in New York, studied textiles both in India and with the Gee’s Bend quilters in Alabama; her figurative portraits bring together textile and painterly techniques. Also in 2022, Legacy Russell organized “The New Bend,” a group show at Hauser & Wirth gallery that drew connections between the Gee’s Bend quilters and 12 risingstar artists, including Tomashi Jackson, Eric N. Mack, and Basil Kincaid. Russell described the Gee’s Bend makers as “artists and technologists,” positioning younger artists as their inheritors exploring the many links between textiles and digital tools. The warps and wefts of fabric, for instance, work like a grid of pixels, while their collage techniques recall the disjointed experience of browsing the internet.

The digital plays a significant role in much of the new textile work. Nakazawa turns digitally collaged images of artworks, often by non- Western makers, into jacquard-woven textiles made in North Carolina on recycled cotton. She then embellishes the fabric with hand-stitched elements like shisha mirrors and sequins. “Jacquard is the original computer,” she said, pointing out that women dominated computer programming before the field became lucrative. Digital imagery is also a source for New York–based Pauline Shaw, who studied sculpture at RISD before teaching herself felting through online tutorials. She now mines online museum collections, along with her personal history, to create textile works exploring cultural memory. A first-generation Taiwanese American, Shaw’s tapestries often rework motifs found in East Asian decorative arts. Taw (2022), made from felted wool and cotton scrim, features stylized forms representing a marble, a peony, a chrysanthemum—an emblem of good luck—as well as a poppy, symbolizing extraction and global trade. Small blown-glass objects, resembling flora, dangle from the tapestry’s bottom edge. “In the absence of heirlooms, familial stories and memories became folktales,” Shaw said during a walk-through of a two-artist show at Chapter NY gallery this past February.

For Shaw, the technique of felting—one of the oldest known to humankind—evokes “spaces of the home, care and nurture,” as well as the large-scale textiles that illustrated cultural origin myths in medieval and dynastic China. For Knight Knight (2022), she reinterpreted a Chinese tapestry from the late 16th–early 17th century that depicts the world through land, sea, and sky. Panel with a Phoenix and Birds in a Rock Garden, from the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is barely recognizable in Shaw’s flipped, vertical interpretation, where stylized birds circle a reddish center, surrounded by magmalike whorls of beiges, blues, and oranges. A similar tension between legibility and abstraction animated Shaw’s 2021 work The Tomb-Sweeper’s Mosquito Bite, commissioned by the New York venue The Shed. In that monumental installation, a 24-foot-long felted tapestry was suspended from the ceiling by a metal armature and cables, its weight counterbalanced by multiple blown-glass orbs. The delicate glass vessels contained objects based on Taoist altar objects and Chinese zodiac signs, while the felted textile’s abstract design, resembling a tangle of branches, was based on an MRI scan of the artist’s brain. “I liked that this large, seemingly abstract work actually held a lot of specific information,” she said.

These artists haven’t entirely abandoned painting; instead, they are recombining it into an expanded visual vocabulary. Nakazawa still makes paintings, but usually as part of a broader mixed-media work: Her 2019 piece History has failed us … but no matter, includes jacquard-print found fabrics and collaged images of the Japanese internment site Camp Minidoka, where her grandmother and other family members were held during World War II. Here, found fabrics attest to the international digital distribution of patterns and the cannibalization of cultures in contemporary textiles. Nakazawa said these contemporary textile patterns, such as flowers and pleasant abstractions, derive from specific decorative arts traditions. Today, however, they are digitally shared and reprinted around the world, with slight tweaks to color or scale. “Even things that do have deeper cultural meanings also exist in a weird ether of diasporic longing,” she said.

Traditionally, decorative art has been considered less valuable than painting. For these artists, however, textiles, and craft in general, are liberating. De Magalhaes described her turn to craft—she also works in ceramics, inspired by time spent in her mother’s pottery studio—as a “desire to unlearn” the “heavy cerebral” way of working that she studied in art school. Nonetheless, her evocative dreamy works often draw comparisons to painterly pieces. Writer Gaby Cepeda has likened de Magalhaes’s imagery to Old Testament figures, while Andrew Berardini has noted her work’s relationship to the Symbolism of Odilon Redon. Her own goal, she said, is to “find joy and pleasure and meaning within the chaos that is the human condition.”

Fascinated by dolls from a young age, Harper began making his own as a child and developed his hobby into an intricate practice. After a brief stint at Glasgow School of Art, he began to sell work online, and received commissions from people including R&B star Elah Hale and movie director Lee Daniels that encouraged him to quit art school to put all his focus into his work. He makes his busts and full figures from polymer clay, presenting them in contexts ranging from rethought myths to sex scenes, addressing race and power through a lens that elevates Black strength and beauty to godlike status. “This is all about an appreciation of the feminine,” he said. “I don’t do drag. I communicate through making, and this is my way of communicating my appreciation.”

Part of Harper’s inspiration comes from his desire to move Black figures from supporting roles to stardom. He grew up watching his late grandfather, the two-time Mr. Universe Paul Wynter, in sword-and-sandal films. But while he admired his success, he would have loved to see him as a main character rather than in the “helper” roles in which he was usually cast. In Harper’s artistic world, all characters are the main attraction, as super-beings evoking both ancient Greek myths and 1970s Blaxploitation films.

On Instagram, where Harper’s handle is Pig.malion, a nod to the Greek myth, Harper has racked up nearly 100,000 followers, and his online success has recently converted to the real world: This past December he had a solo exhibition at Good Black Art in New York. The power in his work, he said, “comes from [certain] influences initially. Then, once I work on a piece, the way it has been created takes on a whole new power of its own.” 

Born in Baghdad in 1984, Sami was a teenager when he got a job painting propagandistic murals of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. After the United States–led invasion, Sami briefly worked for the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, helping recover looted artworks, before migrating to Sweden in 2007, and then to London, where he completed an MFA at Goldsmiths in 2018. Since showing at Luhring Augustine in New York and in the most recent Carnegie International, he has become known for his quietly haunting paintings. The small windows and skewed perspective of the domestic spaces in many of his works are a nod to his childhood interest in Islamic miniatures. Even in these intimate spaces, the presence of Saddam can be felt. In Infection II (2021), an image of Saddam hangs in a home. Once again, his face is cast in shadow; a spidery houseplant likewise imparts a creepy profile. It’s an unsettling image in which the prospect of violence seems to infiltrate the family home.

In Sami’s work, latent images tinted by time and trauma represent history. “The things I articulate in my artwork are memories hidden in the brain cells that are waiting for a trigger,” he told the Guardian this past March. Domestic scenes and roiling landscapes, which may nod subtly to war or sectarian strife, hover on the edge of abstraction. In A barricade against bombs … 23 Years of Night (2022), for instance, a crosshatching technique redolent of Jasper Johns materializes at a distance into two pieces of plywood protecting windows from a blast. Painted mostly on linen, these works often feel stained or rubbed raw.

The seamless transitions from abstraction to figuration in Sami’s paintings, along with various shifts in scale in their interiors, recall the unsettling and enduring imprints politics leave on everyday life. Over the painted plywood in 23 Years of Night, Sami rendered a gauzy curtain dotted with stars—the protected portal seen from inside. Bearing witness to totalitarianism and war, he seems to say, requires more than just courage. Trapped in darkness, he dreams of the sky.

Mostly, I guessed wrong about the show. The exhibition focuses on works she made around the 1910s, in series and on paper. Still, I was fascinated by how similar the early and late works are. In both periods, she often used watercolor to draw bold lines. And in both, her watercolor was rarely, well, watery. O’Keeffe laid the paint on thick. She liked pairing greens with pinks—though the complimentary combo grows much bolder in those works from the end of her career. She’d try out the same composition with subtle variations, often leaving lots of the paper raw, working in series. You get the sense that spending time with the scene at hand is more about grasping and distilling its essence than it is copying it precisely.

One of O’Keeffe’s assistants, Carol Merrill, writes in a memoir that the artist kept her blindness private during her lifetime. She also recounted to Merril that she lost her vision slowly, but adjusted to blindness rapidly. Still, O’Keeffe was encouraged to keep it private by her dealer, who worried it would devalue her work. So often, we celebrate artists for helping us see the world differently; yet so often, we are reminded that certain perspectives are too different, unwelcome.

The oil on canvas works are traditionally considered her greatest hits, but critics everywhere—Jackson Arn in the New Yorker, Sebastian Smee in the Washington Post, Johanna Fateman in 4Columns—are loving these works on paper. They point to the obvious sense of freedom she felt in her youth, and absent the perssure of a canvas. It made me wish that more of the works she made late in her career, hiding her truth from an ableist world, could have been up at MoMA, too.

There is actually one painting on view that she made while blind. But it’s not on the checklist or in the catalogue, and it’s displayed in more of a stairwell than a gallery. Don’t miss it. It’s called From a Day with Juan II (1977), and it’s from a series of canvases she made that shows a foreshortened, rectangular gray gradient extending upward into a blue sky. In the slideshow up top, I’m including some other works she made after going blind—excerpts from series, works that I’d have included if it were up to me. They speak, I think, to the astonishing persistence of her artistic vision, which outlived her ocular one.

It wasn’t long ago that the mention of goddesses or matriarchy would have condemned an artist to the nether world of irrelevance. But now, Mutu emerges as one of the foremost practitioners of contemporary Goddess Art, and these become words of praise.

Though long stigmatized, the reputations of artists identified with the original Goddess movement of the 1960s—among them Mary Beth Edelson, Ana Mendieta, and Judy Chicago—have soared in recent years. The presiding spirit of last year’s Venice Biennale was Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, who identified the “greatest revelation of my life” as Robert Graves’s book The White Goddess, a study of mythology and poetry in pre-Christian nature-based matriarchies. The British Museum recently offered a mammoth examination of female spiritual figures across cultures and historical periods. And younger artists like Saya Woolfalk, Chitra Ganesh, and Lina Iris Viktor seem increasingly comfortable with invocations of female deities and spiritual powers.

What accounts for this sea change? Significantly, this renewed interest in icons of female power comes at a moment when political and social institutions are actively threatening female autonomy at home and abroad. Then, there is the fact that the original movement embraced a gender-fluid concept of the Goddess that resonates today. Meanwhile, the climate crisis underscores the urgent need for a different understanding of nature, progress, and technology. The Goddess movement’s holistic theory of nature is compatible with current developments in the fields of biology and ecology. And new scholarship in anthropology and archaeology lends support to the idea that early societies were, if not strictly matriarchal, at least matrilineal and matrilocal. In the art world, all this adds up to a growing awareness that many of the artists originally associated with the Goddess movement were unfairly maligned. Now, a group of younger artists is finishing what they started.

THE GODDESS MOVEMENT was born in the early 1960s, when second-wave feminists bolstered their indictment of toxic patriarchy with alternative visions of society, history, and gender relations. Many were energized by archaeological discoveries that pointed to the prehistoric existence of ancient matriarchies and to widespread worship of female deities. These ideas coalesced into the Goddess movement, a celebration of feminine spirituality that served as inspiration to numerous artists, scholars, and writers.

Critic Gloria Feman Orenstein surveyed the work of these artists in an essay in the spring 1978 edition of Heresies, a self-described “Feminist Publication on Art and Politics” that ran between 1977 and 1993. Issue #5, The Great Goddess, comprises a collection of poems, artworks, scholarly essays, and speculative fantasies that reveal the range and complexity of women’s views on the subject. It includes lists of megalithic temples associated with goddess worship, prescriptions for the creation of new rituals, explorations of Indigenous spiritual practices, and celebrations of menstruation and childbirth. Some contributors search for empirical proof of prehistoric matriarchies, while others regard such societies as simply metaphors or useful guides to thinking about a post-patriarchal future.

Orenstein’s essay includes Carolee Schneemann, who evoked the Minoan Snake Goddess by placing two snakes on her body for her 1963 Eye Body performance; Ana Mendieta merging her body with the earth; Mary Beth Edelson channeling ancient goddesses in ritual performances; Betye Saar creating talismans to honor Black Goddesses and Voodoo Priestesses; Betsy Damon bypassing the patriarchy in performances that assumed the part of a 7,000-year-old woman; and Judy Chicago crafting a creation myth with a goddess as the supreme creatrix.

Running through the projects presented in Heresies is a sense of excitement over the possibilities unleashed by these feminist challenges to the male-centric Judeo-Christian theologies that have dominated Western culture. But the contributors are adamant that they are not seeking a simple reversal of power. As religion scholar Charlene Spretnak remarked in her anthology, The Politics of Women’s Spirituality (1982), “no one is interested in revering a ‘Yahweh in a skirt.’” Instead, the Goddess emerging from Heresies is less a person or an individual agent than a nexus of nature, spirit, and body. She represents social cooperation and attunement to the forces of nature. While male power emphasizes domination and control, the contributors argue, goddess-inspired female power yields a more cooperative society, one that recognizes the rights of other people, other species, and the earth itself.

Heresies wrote revisionist histories, identifying precedents for this concept in early human societies. They found support from scholars. In Lost Goddesses of Early Greece (1978),Spretnak revives an ecosystem of female deities that preceded the Greek Olympians. Artist and writer Merlin Stone’s 1978 When God Was a Woman documented the suppression of goddess societies in the Middle East by a triumphant Abrahamic culture. Cultural historian Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future (1987) explored the tensions between two models of society—feminist partnership cultures versus patriarchal dominator cultures—that have persisted throughout human history.

A key figure in this rethinking of history was archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, a specialist in Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures. Her 1974 book The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe challenged standard accounts of European prehistory that suggested inequality was inevitable as societies scaled up, divided labor, and pivoted to agriculture from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles. She posited the existence of cooperative, peaceful, female-centered social orders in the Neolithic era, and theorized that these were wiped out beginning in 4400 BCE by nomadic warring Bronze Age invaders. While other scholars had largely downplayed the significance of female figurines, dismissing them as mere fertility goddesses, she saw them as figures embodying the making and destroying of life whose powers were at the center of these societies’ female-oriented spiritual belief systems. She argued that the societies of Neolithic Europe were largely peaceful, “matristic” (a word describing their deference to female authority that she preferred to “matriarchal”), and attuned to nature and goddess worship.

Unlike subsequent patriarchal cultures that envisioned nature as an external entity and a resource to be dominated and exploited, these early societies, Gimbutas argues, worshiped the “unbroken unity of one deity, a Goddess who is ultimately Nature herself.” This concept of nature finds a striking parallel in the work of chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis who, in the early 1970s, developed the Gaia Theory. According to the Greek poet Hesiod, Gaia was the child of Chaos who brought the world into being and also produced such fearsome races as the Titans, Giants, and Cyclopes. As creator and destroyer, she was hailed as the Great Mother, the origin of life, and the personification of earth. Inspired perhaps by the Goddess vibes floating around in the 1970s, Lovelock and Margulis attached the name Gaia to their concept of the planet as a self-regulating system. They argued that living organisms evolve in response to their surroundings, both animate and inorganic, to maintain the conditions for the continuation of life. Gaianism paints a picture of the interdependence of life and nonlife that mirrors the beliefs of early Goddess societies.

Gimbutas’s work did not age well. While The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe became an important resource for artists and writers associated with the Goddess movement, Gimbutas’s academic fate suffered, in part due to her association with the Goddess artists. Once a towering figure, she was charged with the sins of essentialism and utopianism, and dismissed as a crank or fantasist. Academic rivals disseminated a caricatured version of her views, made light of her research and professional qualifications, and ignored the widespread respect her peers accorded her. Today, few archaeological texts cite her work.

In the 1980s, the Goddess movement took a hit. The idea of women building shrines to pagan goddesses, performing rituals to mark the phases of the moon, or conjuring the spirits of women burned as witches seemed anti-intellectual—and frankly, embarrassing. The Goddess fixation smacked of wishful thinking, of surrender to New Age fantasies of lost matriarchal utopias, and of a retrograde equation of women with nature. It seemed essentialist, ahistorical, and rife with cultural appropriation.

As the 1980s wore on, celebrations of matriarchy gave way to gender deconstruction. A feminist identification with Mother Earth was supplanted by Barbara Kruger’s cry, “We won’t play nature to your culture,” the title of her landmark 1983 show. Then, Donna Haraway declared in A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”

IT TOOK A RETROSPECTIVE of feminist art—“WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution,” which opened in 2007 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles—to remind the art world of the original Goddess movement artists. The same year, “Global Feminisms” at the Brooklyn Museum featured works made from 1990 onward, under the influence of a variety of transnational spiritual traditions. But there was still stigma. As art historian Jennie Klein noted in 2009, “the Goddess is the unacknowledged white elephant in the room of feminist body art.”

Alongside renewed interest in the original Goddess artists, new scholarship now supports Gimbutas’s account of Neolithic history. In The Dawn of Everything (2021), a monumental reconsideration of the origins of human society by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, Gimbutas reemerges as a visionary. The authors contend that “among academics today, belief in primitive matriarchy is treated as a kind of intellectual offence, almost on a par with ‘scientific racism,’ and its exponents have been written out of history.” Yet they point to new evidence of the relatively peaceful and egalitarian societies that Gimbutas described, and confirm that these were indeed, as she suggested, largely destroyed from 4400 BCE on by marauding Indo-Europeans whose societies were prone to violence, indifferent to art and nature, and dominated by men. Graeber and Wengrow argue that Gimbutas’s dismissal can be understood in part because she “was attempting to do something which, until then, only men had been allowed to do: craft a grand narrative for the origins of Eurasian civilization.”

Meanwhile, Haraway, once a goddess denier, has more recently embraced Lovelock and Margulis’s concept to describe the interdependence of organic, inorganic, and mechanical forces—including, famously, the cyborg. Today, the Gaianism movement holds an important, though controversial, place in discussions about biology, chemistry, genetics, and environmentalism. Proponents stress cooperation and revere mutualistic relations, emblematized by the holobiont—a unit made up of one host, plus the other species that live in, on, or around it. This idea encourages a kind of ecosystemic thinking—an awareness of and reverence for the other species surrounding us—that has had tremendous impact
on artists today.

Margulis, who in 1991 coined the term holobiont and placed symbiosis—mutually beneficial relationships—at the center of cellular evolution, was the presiding spirit over a recent exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Titled “Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere,” the show focused on artists who explore instances of Gaianist mutualism. While these artists might not characterize themselves as goddess worshipers, their work expresses a vision of nature very close to Gimbutas’s “unbroken unity” of the Goddess. The artists probe various forms of symbiotic entanglement by introducing spiders into the gallery (Pierre Huyghe), interrogating the intelligence of bacteria (Jenna Sutela), transforming soil into currency (Claire Pentecost), and “painting” with freshwater algae (Anicka Yi).

MORE TRADITIONAL GODDESS IMAGERY is found in the British Museum’s recent exhibition “Feminine Power: the Divine to the Demonic.” But here too, it is clear that goddesses are not simply the obverse of a singular male creator god. Rather, female deities and demons play many roles in the creation and destruction of life. At one extreme is the rebellion against authoritarian male power embodied in Kiki Smith’s 1994 sculpture Lilith,which presents Adam’s disobedient first wife as a glowering she-demon crouching on the wall. Lilith exists on a continuum that also embraces the creative forces of nature, the maternal instincts of protection and nurture, and the reason-defying seductions of sexuality. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Lilith’s vengeful glare is a sense of solidarity and mutualism that reflects the entangled relationships between all life-forms celebrated by the “Symbiont” artists.

“Feminine Power” brings together secular and sacred artifacts from six continents dating from 6000 BCE to the present. Curator Belinda Crerar divides her selections into categories that stress creation, compassion, and desire, as well as disruption and force. She mingles contemporary works by artists like Kiki Smith, Alison Saar, Mona Saudi, Judy Chicago, and Wangechi Mutu with Cycladic fertility figures, Yoruban water goddesses, Tantric scrolls, Mesopotamian amulets, and Buddhist statues of Guanyin. Two striking themes emerge from this wealth of material: the transnational nature of goddess imagery and the widespread evidence throughout history of a gender-fluid concept of divine power. In many cultures, the earth divinity or creator deity displays masculine and feminine characteristics.

In its Great Goddess issue, Heresies sought a cross-cultural approach, with essays on Native American spiritual practices, West African secret female societies, and Indian Goddess worship. Nevertheless, like second-wave feminism generally, the Goddess artists of the 1970s presented a largely white demographic. Gimbutas’s focus on Old Europe may have contributed to the Eurocentric orientation of many of the artists for whom she was a guiding light.

Contemporary Goddess artists—Mutu chief among them—share their predecessors’ desire to use icons of female power and divinity as a springboard to envision new futures. But the new and more diverse generation brings a wider range of cultural references to the table. Mutu contributed an unsettling female figure composed of soil and ornamented with charcoal, oyster shells, feathers, hide, porcelain, and hair to “Feminine Power.” In the catalogue, she describes the work, Grow the Tea, then Break the Cups (2021), as a guardian figure endowed with a feminine intelligence. The artist elaborates: “I feel that in general women think about the future, different species, more than men. Women’s intellect, instincts and intuition are essential if we want to continue living in this world.” The Kenya-born artist’s current retrospective offers perspectives on East African creation stories and Caribbean mythology.

Not content with the essentialist conflation of women with life-giving forces of goddess art past, artists like Morehshin Allahyari and Chitra Ganesh don’t shy away from the less savory implications of gender-fluid divinity. Not all their goddesses play nice. Ganesh’s monumental 2015 Eyes of Time installation at the Brooklyn Museum paid homage to Kali, Hindu goddess of destruction and rebirth. Tri-breasted and multiarmed, Ganesh’s Kali has a clock in lieu of a head. The clock signifies that we have now entered a period called Kali Yuga, the final tumultuous age in the Hindu cosmic cycle in which the destruction of our world will herald the beginning of a new Golden Age.

New York–based Iranian artist Allahyari has been engaged in a multiyear project similarly dark in tone, using 3D printing to revive a coterie of fearsome jinns—shape-shifting spirits from Islamic literature and pre-Islamic legend that Allahyari reimagines as nonbinary, proto-feminist figures. One of her recurring characters is the jinn Huma, traditionally depicted as a demon with three heads and two tails. In pre-Islamic and Islamic mythology, Huma is responsible for human fevers; in Allahyari’s formulation, the spirit presides over the planet’s fever in the form of global warming. As the artist told an interviewer for Hyperallergic, “I’m not interested in the motherly goddesses. I’m only interested in the dark ones and the monstrous ones, and the cruelty of each of their powers that will take over something.”

For this new generation of feminist artists, Goddess imagery offers a language for exploring concerns like environmentalism, indigeneity, and gender fluidity. While they share the original Goddess artists’ worship of the feminized values of care and cooperation, the new generation also reflects our era’s anxiety and apocalypticism. In place of uplift, they are conscious of the potential for civilizational collapse. Climate change suggests that the nature goddess can take as well as give. While the original Goddess artists emphasized the nurturing side of female deities, it must be remembered that goddesses like Ishtar and Kali were both makers and destroyers of life. Adopting the language of Gaianism, Mutu suggests what is at stake today, remarking: “Building on the backs of other human beings by ravaging, squandering and pillaging depletes the earth and us all. The planet is intelligent and alive and constantly reminding us what it can be like, if we treat each other fairly.”  

Spades, snow shovels, pitchforks, and mops likewise droop from pegs, their ends sometimes looped through handles in impossibly pliable ways. Giving new insight to the phrase “soft sculpture,” Raul de Lara’s so-called “tired tools” anthropomorphically evoke exhausted workers. In a conversation with me, de Lara referred to them as “portraits of invisible labor,” with the absent though implied laboring bodies being those of domestic and agricultural workers, who in this country are frequently undocumented immigrants from Latin America.

De Lara understands aspects of this population intimately; as a child he immigrated to the United States from Mexico, and remains here thanks to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Act. (Unfortunately, DACA does not provide a pathway to citizenship, and those “dreamers” like de Lara who came to the US as children must reapply for status every two years. He has not been able to leave the country in the nearly 20 years since his arrival, for fear of not being allowed to reenter.) When he and his family arrived, they initially worked in jobs typical of the undocumented: those in food service, construction, and landscaping. De Lara’s parents having been college-educated white-collar workers, this shift to physical labor presented a somewhat rude awakening to the material properties of the tools of manual labor.

De Lara explores the inexorable relationship between work and weariness in a series he has recently undertaken, producing functional but ersatz chairs. Soft Chair (2022), for instance, is not at all soft, and its uneven legs made from stocky bark-covered branches project an inherent unsteadiness. It seems a quite rough-hewn and rustic object, except for the ostensibly plush dimpled fabric of its seat and back lovingly worked from solid live-edged slabs of elm. This trompe l’oeil cushioning pushes wood into an imagined zone of comfort, while retaining its inescapable rigid materiality.

Some of his other chair sculptures are even less welcoming, comprising hundreds of sharpened spikes that, set in pinewood stained bright green, emulate cactus spines. A few, like The Wait (2021) and The Wait (Again), 2022, are large bucket chairs on rockers; others, like Sugar and Torito (both 2021), are smaller cactus rockers, outfitted with toddler-size saddles. In For Being Left-Handed (2020), a high-backed cactus chair takes the shape of a school desk, a writing arm made of particle board attached to its left side, complete with wads of chewed gum stuck to its underside. If employed, many of de Lara’s objects would harm their users. Literally bending the possibilities of carpentry in new directions, de Lara’s work imbues woodcarving, that most ancient craft, with a new stake in representing conditions for people often unnoticed in the US, for whom laboring to stay in place requires a sometimes painful resilience to intense physical and mental hardship.

“There are very large assets … areas that have not been developed yet, especially in the tourism field, or others,” bin Salman said. “I believe that the size of these assets will be one trillion riyals.”

Bin Salman’s tourism plan centered around AlUla, a desert region that has been described as an open-air museum for the 30,000 historical sites that dot the landscape, some dating back as far as 7,000 years. The most important is Hegra, the country’s only UNESCO World Heritage site and a Nabataean wonder of more than 100 tombs carved out of sandstone cliffs. Saudi Arabia is spending more than $35 billion over the next seven years, to turn the region, and Hegra, once a crucial trading post along the Silk Road, into a new kind of international crossroad, an official told Art in America.

The Kingdom hopes to draw over 2 million visitors to the region per year, a tall order for a country that up until a couple years ago allowed visitors only for religious pilgrimages.

France has been at the center of the project almost since the beginning, signing a 10-year, €30 million ($32.4 million) per year deal in 2018 to provide “expertise” in the development of luxury lodging, fine dining, horse-related sporting activities, artistic and cultural exhibitions, and artist residencies. Already, an international airport, a 12-mile greenway and tramline, numerous hotels, and an Arab history museum have opened or are in development.

But contemporary art, set amid AlUla’s ancient ruins and ocher desert canyons, is considered key as a symbol of Saudi Arabia’s much-touted liberalization and growing activity in the art market.

While the development has already seen its share of arts initiatives, it reached a new level in mid-March when France’s premier contemporary art museum, the Centre Pompidou, announced a long-gestating contract to help develop a museum at AlUla. But the project, like France’s greater involvement in AlUla, has left all parties to navigate the delicate politics of a long isolated and repressive kingdom gradually opening to the world.

Wang began carving these animal sculptures in New York in early 2020, working outdoors in the city’s parks. When a monthlong trip to his native Dalian, China, for Lunar New Year turned into two years there under lockdown, the sculptures became a source of succor, the sweet scenes depicted in them a respite during a difficult time. A video he made at that time, Seven Star Road (2020), alternates between close-up shots of him carving the pieces in his apartment and views of the streets of Dalian from his window. The peaceful sculpting process is a stark contrast to the turmoil and distress in the city outside. Lockdown was still in place when Wang first unveiled the pieces, along with the video, in a virtual exhibition on 47 Canal’s website. Alongside them, he displayed poems he’d written that refer obliquely to the sculptures, and to the circumstances of their creation: “Outside the glass wall, on the lawn, on the ceiling,” one reads, “statues and art / Nothing to do with me.”

Like much of Wang’s work, the animal pieces are a way of confronting the history of classical figurative sculpture, a tradition Wang knows well, having been trained in realist sculpture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing before earning an MFA at Columbia University. After Columbia, Wang returned to a historic quarry in China, recovered a couple of discarded sculptures of biblical figures, and re-carved their faces as portraits of the Chinese workers who made them. Those sculptures became embroiled in a controversy over the attempt of a Los Angeles arts nonprofit to place them in a public park in an area of the city that had once been white-dominated, but had become majority Asian; a staunch group of locals nixed the project. (The sculptures were eventually exhibited at LA’s Vincent Price Art Museum.)

In a 2019 show at 47 Canal, Wang showed a small-scale version of the Athena sculpture that currently stands in the park—a figure carved, ironically, in stone from the same Chinese quarry—along with a video documenting the aborted park project and, particularly, the local backlash. He is interested not just in artworks, but in their supply chains. He uses his own productions to challenge the lofty ideals of beauty, civilization, and human achievement often associated with stone sculpture. Instead, he unearths traces of what we tend to think of as comparatively minor quotidian themes: humor, cuteness, a sense of belonging, and, of course, kindness.

The computer (as a graphic tool) is relatively new in the current rush of technology. In America, widespread use of the computer dates approximately from 1955, when a line of commercial units first became available.

In 1963 computers began to develop possibilities for making graphics. An electric microfilm recorder was introduced; it can plot points and draw lines a million times faster than a human draftsman. This machine and the electronic computer which controls it thus make feasible various kinds of graphic movies which heretofore would have been prohibitively intricate, time-consuming and expensive.

The microfilm recorder consists essentially of a display tube and a camera. It understands only simple instructions such as those for advancing the film, displaying a spot or alphabetic character at specified coordinates or drawing a straight line from one point to another. Though this repertoire is simple, the machine can compose complicated pictures—or series of pictures—from a large number of basic elements: it can draw ten thousand to one hundred thousand points, lines or characters per second.

This film-exposing device is therefore fast enough to tum out, in a matte r of seconds , a television-quality image consisting of a fine mosaic of closely spaced spots, or to produce simple line drawings at rates of several frames per second.

As a technically oriented film-artist , I realized the possibilities of the computer as a new graphic tool for film-making in 1964 and began my exploration of this medium. I have since made nine computer-generated films. To produce these films the following procedure was used: an IBM 7094 computer was loaded with a set of sub-routines (instructions) which perform the operations for computizing the movie system called “Beflix” devised by Ken Knowlton of Bell Telephone Laboratories. The movie computer program is then written, in this special language, and put on punched cards; the punched cards are then fed into the computer; the computer tabulates and accepts the instructions on the cards calculating the explicit details of each implied picture of the movie and putting the results of this calculation on tape. To visualize this: imagine a mosaic-like screen with 252 x 184 points of light each point of light can be turned on or off from instructions on the program. Pictures can be thought of as an array of spots of different shades of gray. The computer keeps a complete “map” of the picture as the spots are turned on and off. The programmer instructs the system to “draw” lines, arcs, lettering. He can also invoke operations on entire areas with instructions for copying, shifting, transliterating, zooming, and dissolving and filling areas. The coded tape is then put into another machine that reads the tape and instructs a graphic display device (a Stromberg-Carlson 4020), which is a sophisticated cathode-tube system similar to a TV picture tube. Each point of light turns on/off according to the computerized instructions on the tape. A camera over the tube, also instructed when to take a picture by information from the computer, then records on film that particular movie frame. After much trial and error—during which time the computer informs you that you have not written your instructions properly—you have a black-and-white movie. This is edited in traditional movie techniques, and color is added by a special color-printing process developed by artists Bob Brown and Frank Olvey.

Movie-making was for long the most revolutionary art form of our time. Now television touches the nerve-ends of all the world; the visual revolution sits in just about every living room across America. The image revolution that movies represented has now been overhauled by the television evolution, and is approaching the next visual stage-to computer graphics to computer controls of environment to a new cybernetic “movie art.”

For the artist the new media of movies, TV, computers, cybernetics, are tools that have curved the perspectives of vision, curving both outward and inward. The revolution of ideas and the ecology of the senses began in 1900 (movies were “invented” about the same time as psychoanalysis). Trace the path of ideas of painting over the past sixty years: the breakup of nineteenth-century ideals, step by step; the obj et d’art to nonobjective art; cubism-simultaneous perception; futurism—motion and man machine metaphysics; dadaism-anti-art, pro-life; surrealism—the dream as the center of the mental universe; action painting—synthetic time-motion; happenings—two-dimensional painting comes off the wall; op art-illusion as retinal “reality”; pop art” reality” as reminder of reality; minimal art-illusion of reduction; conceptual art-the elements of illusion.

In other words, we have been moving closer to a “mental” state of art/life. Now we move into the area of computers, an extension of the mind with a tool technically as responsive as ourselves. In the developing mental art/life, to “think” about the work is the process of doing the work.

An abstract notation system for making movies and image storage and retrieval systems opens a door for a kind of mental attitude of movie-making: the artist is no longer restricted to the exact execution of the form; so long as he is clear in his mind as to what he wants, eventually he can realize his movie or work on some computer, somewhere.

What shall this black box, this memory system of the world, this meta-physical printing press do for us? Compare the computer to driving a fast sports car; it is difficult to control; although the irony is that at higher speeds less effort is needed to alter and change directions. However, more skill—a complex man/machine understanding—is required.

The future of computers in art will be fantastic, as amplifiers of human imagination and responses, of kinetic environments programmed to each of our interests; in short, computers will shape the overall ecology of America.

It’s not very far from the Gutenberg press of movable bits of type to the logic “bits” of the computer. No doubt computers will be as common as telephones in our lives; art schools in the near future will teach programming as one of the new psycho-skills of the new technician-artist-citizen.

Whereas fame and fortune in the art world come from restricting access to an elite few, making it as a digital creator is about giving away as much of yourself as possible. For free, all the time.

“My attitude’s always been, as soon as I post something on the internet, that’s out there,” Winkelmann said. “The internet is an organism. It just eats things and poops them out in new ways, and trying to police that is futile. People take my stuff and upload it and profit from it. They get all the engagements and clicks and whatnot. But whatever.”

Winkelmann leveraged his two million followers and became the face of NFTs. In the process, he became a blue-chip art star, with an eponymous art museum in South Carolina and pieces reportedly selling for close to $10 million to major museums elsewhere. That’s without an MFA, a gallery, or prior exhibitions.

“You can have [a contemporary] artist who is extremely well-selling and making a shitload of money, and the vast majority of people have never heard of this person,” he said. “Their artwork has no effect on the broader visual language of the time. And yet, because they’ve convinced the right few people, they can be successful. I think in the future, more people will come up like I did—by convincing a million normal people.”

In 2021 he might have been right, but more recently that path to art world fame is being threatened by a potent force: artificial intelligence. Last year, Midjourney and Stability AI turned the world of digital creators on its head when they released AI image generators to the public. Both now boast more than 10 million users. For digital artists, the technology represents lost jobs and stolen labor. The major image generators were trained by scraping billions of images from the internet, including countless works by digital artists who never gave their consent.

In the eyes of those artists, tech companies have unleashed a machine that scrambles human—and legal—definitions of forgery to such an extent that copyright may never be the same. And that has big implications for artists of all kinds.

In December, Canadian illustrator and content creator Sam Yang received a snide email from a stranger asking him to judge a sort of AI battle royale in which he could decide which custom artificial intelligence image generator best mimicked his own style. In the months since Stability AI released the Stable Diffusion generator, AI enthusiasts had rejiggered the tool to produce images in the style of specific artists; all they needed was a sample of a hundred or so images. Yang, who has more than three million followers across YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, was an obvious target.

Netizens took hundreds of his drawings posted online to train the AI to pump out images in his style: girls with Disney-wide eyes, strawberry mouths, and sharp anime-esque chins. “I couldn’t believe it,” Yang said. “I kept thinking, This is really happening … and it’s happening to me.”

Yang trawled Reddit forums in an effort to understand how anyone could think it was OK to do this, and kept finding the same assertion: there was no need to contact artists for permission. AI companies had already scraped the digital archives of thousands of artists to train the image generators, the Redditors reasoned. Why couldn’t they?

Like many digital artists, Yang has been wrestling with this question for months. He doesn’t earn a living selling works in rarefied galleries, auction houses, and fairs, but instead by attracting followers and subscribers to his drawing tutorials. He doesn’t sell to collectors, unless you count the netizens who buy his T-shirts, posters, and other merchandise. It’s a precarious environment that has gotten increasingly treacherous.

“AI art seemed like something far down the line,” he said, “and then it wasn’t.”

Yang never went to a lawyer, as the prospect of fighting an anonymous band of Redditors in court was overwhelming. But other digital artists aren’t standing down so easily. In January, several filed a class action lawsuit targeted at Stability AI, Midjourney, and the image-sharing platform DeviantArt.

Brooklyn-based illustrator Deb JJ Lee is one of those artists. By January, Lee was sick and tired of being overworked and undervalued. A month earlier, Lee had gone viral after posting a lowball offer from Epic Games to do illustration work for the company’s smash hit Fortnite, arguably the most popular video game in the world. Epic, which generated over $6 billion last year, offered $3,000 for an illustration and ownership of the copyright. For Lee, it was an all-too-familiar example of the indignities of working as a digital artist. Insult was added to injury when an AI enthusiast—who likely found out about Lee from the viral post—released a custom model based on Lee’s work.

“I’ve worked on developing my skills my whole life and they just took it and made it to zeros and ones,” Lee said. “Illustration rates haven’t kept up with inflation since the literal 1930s.”

Illustration rates have stagnated and, in some cases, shrunk since the ’80s, according to Tim O’Brien, a former president of the Society of Illustrators. The real money comes from selling usage rights, he said, especially to big clients in advertising. Lee continued, “I know freelancers who are at the top of their game that are broke, I’m talking [illustrators who do] New Yorker covers. And now this?”

Lee reached out to their community of artists and, together, they learned that the image generators, custom or not, were trained on the LAION dataset, a collection of 5.6 billion images scraped, without permission, from the internet. Almost every digital artist has images in LAION, given that DeviantArt and ArtStation were lifted wholesale, along with Getty Images and Pinterest.

The artists who filed suit claim that the use of these images is a brazen violation of intellectual property rights; Matthew Butterick, who specializes in AI and copyright, leads their legal team. (Getty Images is pursuing a similar lawsuit, having found 12 million of their images in LAION.) The outcome of the case could answer a legal question at the center of the internet: in a digital world built on sharing, are tech companies entitled to everything we post online?

The class action lawsuit is tricky. While it might seem obvious to claim copyright infringement, given that billions of copyrighted images were used to create the technology underlying image generators, the artists’ lawyers are attempting to apply existing legal standards made to protect and restrict human creators, not a borderline-science-fiction computing tool. To that end, the complaint describes a number of abuses: First, the AI training process, called diffusion, is suspect because it requires images to be copied and re-created as the model is tested. This alone, the lawyers argue, constitutes an unlicensed use of protected works.

From this understanding, the lawyers argue that image generators essentially call back to the dataset and mash together millions of bits of millions of images to create whatever image is requested, sometimes with the explicit instruction to recall the style of a particular artist. Butterick and his colleagues argue that the resulting product then is a derivative work, that is, a work not “significantly transformed” from its source material, a key standard in “fair use,” the legal doctrine underpinning much copyright law.

As of mid-April, when Art in America went to press, the courts had made no judgment in the case. But Butterick’s argument irks technologists who take issue with the suit’s description of image generators as complicated copy-paste tools.

“There seems to be this fundamental misunderstanding of what machine learning is,” Ryan Murdock, a developer who has been working on the technology since 2017, including for Adobe, said. “It’s true that you want to be able to recover information from the images and the dataset, but the whole point of machine learning is not to memorize or compress images but to learn higher-level general information about what an image is.”

Diffusion, the technology undergirding image generators, works by adding random noise, or static, to an image in the dataset, Murdock explained. The model then attempts to fill in the missing parts of the image using hints from a text caption that describes the work, and those captions sometimes refer to an artist’s name. The model’s efforts are then scored based on how accurately the model was able to fill in the blanks, leading it to contain some information associating style and artist. AI enthusiasts working under the name Parrot Zone have completed more than 4,000 studies testing how many artist names the model recognizes. The count is close to 3,000, from art historical figures like Wassily Kandinsky to popular digital artists like Greg Rutkowski.

The class action suit aims to protect human artists by asserting that, because an artist’s name is invoked in the text prompt, an AI work can be considered “derivative” even if the work produced is the result of pulling content from billions of images. In effect, the artists and their lawyers are trying to establish copyright over style, something that has never before been legally protected.

The most analogous recent copyright case involves fine artists debating just that question. Last fall, well-known collage artist Deborah Roberts sued artist Lynthia Edwards and her gallerist, Richard Beavers, accusing Edwards of imitating her work and thus confusing potential collectors and harming her market. Attorney Luke Nikas, who represents Edwards, recently filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that Roberts’s claim veered into style as opposed to the forgery of specific elements of her work.

“You have to give the court a metric to judge against,” Nikas said. “That means identifying specific creative choices, which are protected, and measuring that against the supposedly derivative work.”

Ironically, Nikas’s argument is likely to be the one used by Stability AI and Midjourney against the digital artists. Additionally, the very nature of the artists’ work as content creators makes assessing damages a tough job. As Nikas described, a big part of arguing copyright cases entails convincing a judge that the derivative artwork has meaningfully impacted the plaintiff’s market, such as the targeting of a specific collecting class.

In the end, it could be the history of human-made art that empowers an advanced computing tool: copyright does not protect artistic style so that new generations of artists can learn from those who came before, or remix works to make something new. In 2012 a federal judge famously ruled that Richard Prince did not violate copyright in incorporating a French photographer’s images into his “Canal Zone” paintings, to say nothing of the long history of appropriation art practiced by Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, and others. If humans can’t get in trouble for that, why should AI?

In mid-March, the United States Copyright Office released a statement of policy on AI-generated works, ruling that components of a work made using AI were not eligible for copyright. This came as a relief to artists who feared that their most valuable asset—their usage rights—might be undermined by AI. But the decision also hinders the court’s ability to determine how artists are being hurt financially by AI image generators. Quantifying damages online is tricky.

Late last year, illustrator and graphic novelist Tomer Hanuka discovered that someone had created a custom model based on his work, and was selling an NFT collection titled “Punks by Hanuka” on the NFT marketplace OpenSea. But Hanuka had no idea whom to contact; such scenarios usually involve anonymous users who disappear as soon as trouble strikes.

“I can’t speak to what they did exactly because I don’t know how to reach them and I don’t know who they are,” Hanuka said. “They don’t have any contact or any leads on their page.” The hurt, he said, goes deeper than run-of-the-mill online theft. “You develop this language that can work with many different projects because you bring something from yourself into the equation, a piece of your soul that somehow finds an angle, an atmosphere. And then this [AI-generated art] comes along. It’s passable, it sells. It doesn’t just replace you but it also muddies what you’re trying to do, which is to make art, find beauty. It’s really the opposite of that.”

For those who benefited from that brief magical window when a creator could move more easily from internet to art world fame, new tools offer a certain convenience. With his new jet-setting life, visiting art fairs and museums around the world, Winkelmann has found a way to continue posting an online illustration a day, keeping his early fans happy by letting AI make the menial time-consuming imagery in the background.

This is exactly what big tech promised AI would do: ease the creative burden that, relatively speaking, a creator might see as not all that creative. Besides, he points out, thieving companies are nothing new. “The idea of, like, Oh my god, a tech company has found a way to scrape data from us and profit from it––what are we talking about? That’s literally been the last 20 years,” he said. His advice to up-and-coming digital artists is to do what he did: use the system as much as possible, and lean in.

That’s all well and good for Winkelmann: He no longer lives in the precarious world
of working digital artists. Beeple belongs to the art market now.