Best of outlandart.substack.com on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
9 stories from outlandart.substack.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 30 October 2025, with 23 upvotes and 2 comments in total. The latest was shared on 30 May 2026. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- After the Art World, Part 1
Brian Droitcour argues that the art world is contracting and that digital collectibles are reshaping cultural value, so the post-internet model of seeking institutional legitimacy through online visibility no longer defines the field. He points to Evil Biscuit's Drifella III, a 2025 NFT work that merges collectibles and art and mobilizes the installation view used in post-internet art. Droitcour cites the Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting, which reports that young high-net-worth individuals rank collectibles as equal to or more important than fine art. He also references Ben Davis's concept of "quantitative aesthetics," which Davis describes as an elite culture organized around numbers and metrics rather than connoisseurship.
- Context Creator: The Zero 10 Edition
Zero 10, Art Basel's new section for NFT-based digital art, is a permanent fixture inside the fair rather than a satellite or novelty, yet it does not fully assimilate. Beeple's Regular Animals, in which robotic dogs photographed visitors and dispensed prints, produced 1,024 prints, and 256 of them were also minted as NFTs and given away free. Unlike Digital Art Mile, which in 2024 set up a parallel fair a ten-minute walk from the Messeplatz in Basel, Zero 10 sits within the main fair, and Mat Dryhurst described its mood on X as "two entirely different worlds, no middle ground."
- Beautiful Rules
Brian Droitcour presents Harm van den Dorpel as a protocol artist whose work fuses code and systems with visual form, making the rules of digital platforms visible as aesthetic material. The essay traces his projects from Club Internet and Dissociations through Delinear.info (2014), Death Imitates Language (2016), Mutant Garden Seeder (2021), and Markov's Dream (2022), up to Quantizer (2025). Quantizer, which the essay presents as resolving the tension at the heart of protocol art, is described as a single web page that can be collected but not fixed, recomposing itself through 1980s and '90s dithering algorithms.
- Haute Slop
The central argument is that the art and luxury fashion worlds are backing away from generative AI while also being pulled into it, and that the moralistic tone of much criticism has undermined the risk-taking that moves culture forward. The article cites the British Museum's removal of AI-generated images posted in January, which an Artnet report said came down within six hours, and Gucci's AI images from creative director Demna, who told CNN Style, "If I can use it to do something that gives me a quick idea or visualization of something, why shouldn't I do it?" It contrasts these with Hermès hiring illustrator Linda Merad in early 2026 to create digital assets with a distinctly manual feel. The article is written by Sarah Hromack, founder of Soft Labor.
- Counting from Two to Three
Art critic Brian Droitcour argues that critical digital art from the Web 2.0 era and web3 share a continuity, since both use protocols to expose how users are bound to platforms. Dom Hofmann's Vine, launched in 2012, used six-second loops, and his Loot (for Adventurers), launched in August 2021, consisted of 7,777 on-chain tokens listing eight pieces of fantasy gear. The article contrasts earlier interventionist works, such as Maddy Varner's Kardashian Krypt (2014), which hid messages in images of Kim Kardashian, with web3 works that make contractual terms explicit, such as Manny Palou's 2021 NFT avatar and Lauren Lee McCarthy's Good Night (2021).
- Learning in Public
Outland, a digital art startup that suspended operations in June 2024, is returning as a nonprofit focused on publishing and education in art and technology, according to director Brian Droitcour. The article argues that the art world too often responds to new technologies with alarm rather than curiosity, and it presents the new Outland as a critical institution that learns from the communities shaping digital culture. Planned work includes a machine learning workshop with the School of Visual Arts MA program, starting with a public event on November 20, and "Avatar Studies," a talks event with Amant in Brooklyn. Monthly Substack columns will come from Al Warburton, Sarah Hromack, and Droitcour himself.
- After the Art World, Part 2
Brian Droitcour argues that some NFT art works largely outside the art world, where legitimacy comes from digital visibility and algorithmic legibility rather than institutional endorsement. Jill Magid's Out-Game Flowers (2023) arranges flowers collected from games such as Super Mario Bros. and World of Warcraft into bouquets that treat in-game power-ups as precedents for NFTs. Shezad Dawood's Sea of Redemption (2023) invites collectors to redeem, burn and trade NFTs in exchange for new ones, while Parker Ito and Xanthrax's Profile Pictures (2025) breaks Raphael's Pope Julius II and other paintings into modular traits.
- Everybody Wants to Rule (a) World
Art writer Al Warburton argues that artistic worldbuilding, from Ian Cheng's autonomous simulations to Alice Bucknell's deliberately failing game mods, is closely tied to the sandbox play of games and to a wider urge to find agency in virtual systems. Warburton says the impulse links artists to outsiders who design socially destructive platforms, such as Mark Zuckerberg, whom he describes as coding an interface to ease discomfort around women on campus. He contrasts Bucknell's The Alluvials (2023–24), a Grand Theft Auto V mod about Los Angeles water politics, with Pippin Barr's V R 3 (2017), which explores the technical components of digital water rather than a political reality.
- The People’s Tools
The author, Sarah Hromack, a former Whitney Museum of American Art director of digital media, argues that Cory Arcangel's 2011 Whitney solo exhibition "Pro Tools" is the most significant show of her tenure. The exhibition's works were technically complex but visually simple, and the Whitney allowed visitors to photograph the show for a piece called 777. Arcangel's Real Talk and Airport required the museum's IT department to boost its cell phone signal, and the exhibition's digital reach, including ads designed for Buzzfeed, was wider than the press coverage suggested.