Digital Art Got a Seat Before It Got a Law

In 12 months Art Basel carried its digital-art sector, Zero 10, from Miami Beach to Hong Kong to Basel and back. In June a museum of AI art opened in a Frank Gehry complex in downtown Los Angeles. In the same year the Supreme Court declined to say that a machine can be an author, and the main American case on training image models with artists’ work had not reached trial.

The thesis follows from the sequence. Institutions gave digital and machine-made art a seat in 2026 before the law gave it a settled status.

The seat

Zero 10 made its Asian debut in March with 14 exhibitors. In Basel in June it took the title The Condition, was co-curated with the artist Trevor Paglen, and reported sales that would not embarrass the main floor: John Gerrard’s STANDARD (2022) at $500,000, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Agglomerate (2024) at $180,000, and works by 0xDEAFBEEF at $164,000. The figures are the organizer’s own.

The same Art Basel account, citing the Art Basel and UBS report, has digital, film, and video work rising from 1% to 3% of transactions and from 7% to 10% of sales value. Of 3,100 wealthy collectors surveyed, 51% had bought a digital work.

Dataland, founded by Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkilic, opened on June 20 with Machine Dreams: Rainforest, which runs to January 31, 2027. Its data partners include the Smithsonian, the Natural History Museum in London, and the Getty, Artsy reported. Anadol’s defense of the method, to NPR: “The best way to achieve responsible curation is to build our own models and be radically transparent.”

The cost is counted in electricity. Generating one AI image uses roughly 1,000 times the energy of a basic web search, the MIT researcher Noman Bashir told Smithsonian Magazine. Dataland says its model runs on Oregon servers powered 87% by renewables.

On March 2 the Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter, leaving in place the rule that a work generated autonomously by a machine cannot be copyrighted, because copyright requires a human author. The law firm Holland & Knight called it the end of the road, for now. A second case, Allen v. Perlmutter, is still open. In January the Copyright Office defended its refusal to register Théâtre D’opéra Spatial on the ground that the image was largely generated by Midjourney. The outcome was not found.

The training question is further off. Andersen v. Stability AI, the artists’ class action in California, is set for trial on April 5, 2027, with fair use undecided. In London, Getty Images won permission in January to appeal part of its loss against Stability AI. Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros are still contesting evidence with Midjourney, The Art Newspaper reported.

Some rights holders stopped waiting. Getty announced a multi-year partnership with OpenAI on June 21 that puts licensed photographs into ChatGPT, on undisclosed terms. The lawyer Dale Nelson, writing for Forbes, noted what the deal leaves alone: “the fact that Getty images are now available through ChatGPT does not change the legal rights involved.”

The numbers point two ways. Online-only sales fell to $9.2 billion in 2025, 15% of the market and the lowest since 2019, according to the Art Basel and UBS report. Yet 85% of bids at Christie’s in the first half of 2026 arrived online, and the three big houses sold a record 33,474 lots that way, The Art Newspaper reported. The screen has become the way to bid and has stopped being a separate place to buy.

NFTs are a smaller story than they were. Monthly volume ran near $300 million in early 2026, against more than $1 billion at the 2021–22 peak, by CryptoRank’s account. In the week to October 3 the total was $40.88 million, and the top single sale was a Beeple edition at $436,154, the trade site Cryptonomist reported. For AI at auction the benchmark is still Christie’s Augmented Intelligence sale of early 2025, which made $728,784 and drew an open letter of protest with almost 6,500 signatures. No 2026 sale of its kind was found.

The strongest objection

The objection is older than the technology: that none of this is art. The writer Ted Chiang, cited by Smithsonian Magazine, holds that art is a communication between maker and audience that a predictive algorithm cannot perform. The digital artist Thomas Brummett put it more briefly to NPR: “It’s not and it never will be.” A second objection is commercial. Melanie Gerlis of The Art Newspaper forecast that buyers in 2026 would turn to craft, and visitors to Zero 10 in Hong Kong were divided, a student report from Hong Kong Baptist University found. A seat at a fair proves that a fair wanted the sector. It does not prove that the work will last.

Miami Beach is the home ground. In December 2021 Art Basel gave the blockchain Tezos a stand where visitors minted AI-generated self-portraits, which The Art Newspaper described as the fair’s first interactive NFT exhibition. Four years later Zero 10 opened here as a sector in its own right, with Beeple Studios and Art Blocks, and XCOPY’s Coin Laundry drew more than 2.3 million NFT claims, by Art Basel’s count. The Gray Market newsletter argued afterward that the sector behaved like a sixth Art Basel fair, with its own audience, inside the familiar one.

The 2026 edition, Generation, has 19 projects from 22 galleries and platforms, curated by Karen Archey with Eli Scheinman, according to Art Basel. The artists include Jon Rafman, Refik Anadol, Sarah Meyohas, Studio Drift, LoVid, Harm van den Dorpel, and Daniel Rozin. Exhibitors include Sprüth Magers, Art Blocks, and Miami’s Fredric Snitzer Gallery. Nicole Sales Giles, formerly of Christie’s, is the sector’s first global head.

A Zero 10 stand cost $25,000 in 2025, Artnet reported; the 2026 fee was not found. And the sector did not shrink with the rest of the floor. In a year when the fair cut its footprint by about 12%, Art Basel describes Generation as the largest Zero 10 to date.

Generation closes on December 6. The California trial on how image models were trained is scheduled to open four months later. The works on the floor will be bought and sold in between, under rules that are still being written.

Zero 10 and the other sectors