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What the future art object looks like

What does the future art object look like then? Is it making art that captures the moment with whatever means necessary? And whatever medium is best to convey that feeling? Is it using AI to help churn out the mechanical parts of it faster? Or is that Tom Sachs angle of making things that show the human finger prints?

Or maybe this is an outdated way of thinking about Art. There is now an opportunity for the (proof of) work to be embedded in the artifact11. The behind the scenes, the access, the patronage — the support is for the person not for the art output. , and for the artifact to be how people who weren’t there time travel to it.

What happened at the Naples train station was performance art, and writing it down is what transmuted it into something I can come back to.

What would Magritte, Duchamp have done? How can we use art to show the surreal, absurd nature of our current reality? To reflect it back to people in way that they unshakeably feel? But do it in a way that makes people feel less alone, that brings us together. Would it be more like Dalí who made not only his work but also his life surreal?

In a serendipitous overlap, Tom Sachs did a Marcel Duchamp MoMA Walkthrough earlier this year and touched on this very topic:

This art is the beginning of conceptual art. And it’s not important that you see or touch or even possess the thing. It’s the idea that matters.*

Maybe in this new world order of art both matter, but the balance is shifting. With the digital increasingly doing the execution, the performance of that thing — if it’s not a physical artifact — matters even more.

Art is a way of living creatively · October 10, 2026 · 9:57amMaybe art objects are wrong, the term for it now is, and that’s antiquated, capital-A art. And art is a way of living creatively. Sharing the human experience in the age of machines and AI. Tapping into something that…

Maybe art objects are wrong, the term for it now is, and that’s antiquated, capital-A art. And art is a way of living creatively. Sharing the human experience in the age of machines and AI. Tapping into something that you feel that just so happens other people do too. Tell a story, show your humanness, savor the struggle. Make art that takes time, and let that effort come through in the things that you make, your fingerprints in its imperfections.

With a democratization of technology, anyone can make a cinematic video. And now we’re overrun with novel, beautiful, aesthetic things, but I want things that share an experience and make me deeply feel something. It’s the same move painters made when photography showed up:

There were the traditionalists who refused to change and doubled down on making more realistic paintings… then there were the artists, the people who saw the new technology. They recognized its ability and they decided to turn and run in the opposite direction. They were the impressionists, the surrealists, those who no longer cared to replicate the world exactly as it looked, but rather they had decided to express how it felt to be there… So why not paint something that no machine would be capable of creating? After all, what greater challenge is there than to paint a feeling?11. Jake Frew on Why “Cinematic” Videos Aren’t Enough Anymore

We’ve just got to tap into tales and the sentiment of our time. Sharing our vulnerability, savoring the struggle, embracing friction is all part of that. Imperfection, acceptance, grace, community, helping each other, childlike joy, childlike abandon.

The future is not separating the art from the artist. Support is of the person not for (just) the art output. We support them to encourage them to make more of their art, our patronage enables them to keep transmuting their experiences and ideas into art that we can have a share in feeling. It’s not this one-and-done antiquated model of creativity anymore. Making a career as a modern artist is different now; it’s ongoing, it’s collaborative, it’s engaging with true fans, it’s about us being able to vote for what we want more of to exist in the world.