Russell’s book is not really about the internet, and it’s not really about appropriation. Black Meme is about virality, dispossession, and the complexities of being visible while Black. Russell asks what it is about Blackness that travels so far and wide. And why is it that images and videos of Black people dominate the visual field in such a way that white content creators feint at being Black to promote audience engagement? To answer these questions, Russell constructs a history that spans 19th-century postcards that commemorate lynchings to the first viral GIF.

Animating each of Russell’s case studies is her multifaceted definition of the “Black meme” as “the mediation, copying, and carrying of Blackness itself as a viral agent” predicated on the “promise of violence” and perpetual performance. The Black meme, she writes, is “as much about the transmission of Blackness as it is about the sight and viewership of Whiteness.” The Black meme shows us “that being seen and consumed does not correlate with being compensated.”

Russell’s Black meme does a lot of work to survey the point at which two major phenomena converge: debates about appropriation and the circulation of images and videos of Black people, often in moments of death or trauma. In Russell’s conception, to be perceived while Black is to be seen in pain, a pain that often acts as a trigger for justice. (She writes about well-known social crises surrounding figures such as Emmett Till, Rodney King, and Philando Castile.) What is agonizing about this is that images of Black pain continue to perform long after their political or social inflection point, in the sense that they continue to circulate and cannot reenter the communities from which they came and become private again.

The controversy over Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016) at the 2017 Whitney Biennial is a prime example (and, like nearly all of Russell’s case studies, has been extensively picked over already). Who was Schutz, as a white painter, to claim the image of Till, and to recirculate such a moment of pain and mourning? Referring to the context in which Till’s image was first published in 1955 in Jet, a magazine that had a majority Black readership, Russell writes, “the circulation of Till’s image within a site intended to be engaged for and by Black readers established a radical enclosure of collective intimacy.” But that isn’t necessarily a definitive view. In White Negroes, Jackson argues that, after the white press refused to publish Till’s image, Jet took on the charge “to force America to witness the gruesomeness it had wrought.” In Jackson’s telling, Jet was not an intimate enclosure but a launchpad for intentional virality.

It will always be terrible that suffering has to be put on display to prompt even a modicum of care. So, the question becomes: can images of the kind Russell writes about ever be taken back?

IT IS EVIDENT THAT RUSSELL longs for a controlled space of circulation to emerge within the media ecosystem. Black Meme is most exciting when she suggests paths that might change the way we circulate content, especially in online environments, and analyzes the factors that have led the internet to allow for unbounded transmission. Following the legal scholar K.J. Greene, who wrote extensively on reparations for Black musicians in the context of the illegal downloading mania of the early 2000s, Russell makes the connection between existing legal conceptions of intellectual property law, the public domain, and open-source culture.

A particularly effective example of the threads she weaves together is in her approach to the legal case Lanier v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. In 1850 Swiss zoologist and Harvard professor Louis Agassiz embarked on a research trip to the slave plantations of South Carolina, in search of what he called racially “pure” Africans to support the pseudoscientific theory of polygenism that claims different racial groups do not share common ancestry. Among the enslaved people that Agassiz visited were a man named Renty and his daughter Delia, both of whom Agassiz photographed. Agassiz used the resulting daguerreotypes in his report about polygenism, and they were later transferred to Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology; they were used to decorate brochures and other promotional and educational materials. More than 170 years later, in 2019, Renty’s descendant Tamara Lanier sued Harvard for unlawful possession of the daguerreotypes, claiming they had been taken without consent in the context of enslavement. Her demand was that the photos, thought to be the earliest known photographs of American slaves, be returned to Renty’s surviving family.

In 2021, after a county court granted Harvard’s motion to dismiss Lanier’s claims, she appealed, and the case was brought to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. As Renty and Delia were subjects and not authors, the court ruled that they had no property interest in the photo that Lanier could inherit. As it now stands, the physical daguerreotypes remain in the hands of Harvard, which has thus far made the images, both in physical and copied manifestations, available to the public.

The Harvard Law Review (HLR) suggested that the aim of the court was to allow the images of Renty and Delia to continue circulating, even as the judges recognized the context of slavery and expressed a wish for redress. As was stated in an HLR essay on the case, “what likely made the court wary to recognize some sort of property interest in Lanier was its fear that privatization of the daguerreotypes will result in lack of public access to all sorts of historical images.” But public access as a standard of fairness is something that Russell pushes back on, writing, “this exercise of ‘collective ownership,’ made possible by Harvard placing Renty and Delia’s images into the public domain, echoes the model of ‘open source’ that doubles down as a tactic of dispossession.”

Some internet history: In the early aughts, open-source movements popularized the norm of making code available for public use, and much of the development of Web 1.0 was credited to the free sharing of important knowledge. At the time, it was easy to position the open-source ethos as inherently radical, such that thinkers could write all moon-eyed about a budding high-tech gift economy founded on free labor, and free content as well. But this belief ignored the fact that preexisting power structures dictate who ultimately gets to profit from what is freely shared.

Greene wrote about this issue in the context of how innovations in music by Black musicians went unprotected and uncompensated while white musicians made financial killings. This was possible because Black musicians created wholly new styles, a category that is not covered by copyright law. In his 2008 legal article “‘Copynorms,’ Black Cultural Production, and the Debate Over African-American Reparations,” Greene wrote, “the work of Black artists was so extensively appropriated as to essentially dedicate Black innovation in cultural production into the public domain.”

In Black Meme, Russell applies this thinking beyond cultural production to Blackness in all its viral and visible manifestations. “When we engage Blackness as mythology,” the author writes, “it becomes open-source material, meaning that it can be hacked, circulated, gamified, memed, and reproduced. It is this open-source model that drives what social scientist Kwame Holmes expands on as a form of ‘necrocapitalism’—an extension of political theorist Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics—that makes ‘the value of Black death’ a fungible commodity, worthy of exchange.”

In a country where rights follow property relations, to claim distress without such relations is to be without recourse, grasping at what is “owned” but never recognized. The project of Black scholarship has often been to create a sense of boundedness around Black cultural production such that it might be recognized as something that can be not just compensated but claimed and protected beyond commercial ends. Factor in the internet, and the complexity of the situation soars.

As Russell writes, “To adequately address the economy of unpaid labor triggered by these transmissions on loop necessitates a breaking and remaking of digitality, one predicated on new definitions of authorship. The internet now is the largest institution of visual culture on earth. If this is the case, our very definitions of provenance must be better stipulated and restructured to encompass the study of Black movement and sound as they travel digitally.”

Russell’s plea is powerful, but she more or less stops there, at the point where such work could really begin. Black Meme mentions potential solutions, but mostly in passing. The book references but does not really explain writer Harmony Holiday’s concept of “mimetic emancipation.” And artist Rashaad Newsome’s FUBU (for us, by us) model of viral voguing, meant to renegotiate what Russell describes as “the exposure of queer and Black space as an encrypted third place,” isn’t developed in relation to the idea of the Black meme.

Instead, Russell mentions some of the obstacles to compensation for Black memes, among them the fact that experiences online are valued less than ones offline, even as the potential audience online is far greater. Moreover, certain creators like TikTok dance choreographers argue that they help popularize the music they use, such that these creators are “doubly overlooked” in terms of compensation.

NFTs are dismissed as a potential solution, for they represent “the master’s tools of capitalist monetization in minting their virality.” Because blockchain technologies merely reward attention and are not rooted in “Black, Brown, and queer movement or language,” they merely replicate the existing issue of white creators profiting from Black contributions to the meme pool.

Russell writes that creators of Black memes must “strike, rebel, refuse, mutiny.” She ends the book with powerful commands—“Reparations now! Free the Black meme!”—but these exhortations feel somewhat hollow in the absence of any action that could be connected to such phrases or any new adaptations to the fundamentally unique ways that the internet has changed how we circulate media, the kinds of pain we see, the effects of that pain, and the way we value (or fail to value) cultural production as it exists online. Russell’s contribution is to provide a clear history of how Black performance and pain have consistently molded cultural transmission and hyper-transmission. So yes, “Free the Black meme!” But how?  

“Something the capital ‘A’ art world doesn’t recognize is the power of the collective, it sometimes leans into the cult of the individual,” Ryan Zurrer told ARTnews during a preview of the opening. “But this show is supported by the entire community around Sam.” 

Spratt’s Venice exhibition was put on by 1OF1 Collection, a “collecting club” set up by Zurrer to nurture digital artists working in the NFT space. Since its launch in 2021, 1OF1 has been uniquely successful in bridging the gap between the art world and the Web3 community. Last year, 1OF1 and the RFC Art Collection gifted Anadol’s Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA to the museum, after nearly a year on view in the Gund Lobby. Zurrer also arranged the first museum presentations of Beeple’s HUMAN ONE, a seven-foot-tall kinetic sculpture based on video works, showing it first at Castello di Rivoli in Italy and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, before sending it to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. 

With “The Monument Game,” Zurrer is once again placing digitally native art at the center of the art world. While Anadol and Beeple had large cultural footprints prior to Zurrer’s patronage, Spratt is far earlier in his career. But, what attracted Zurrer, he said, was the artist’s shrewd approach to building a dedicated, participatory audience for his work. He did so by making his art a game. 

“When I first started looking at NFTs, I spent a long time just figuring out who the players were,” Spratt told ARTnews. “The auctions were like stories in themselves, I could see people’s friends bidding, almost ceremonially, to give the auction some energy, and then other people would come in, and it would get competitive, emotional.”

Spratt released his first three NFTs on the platform SuperRare in October 2021. The sale of those works, the first from his series LUCI, was accompanied by a giveaway of a free NFT to every person who put in a bid. Zurrer had been one of those underbidders (for the work Birth of Luci). While Spratt said the derivative NFTs were basically worthless, he wanted to give something back to each bidder. Zurrer, and others it seems, appreciated the gesture and Spratt quickly gained a following in the Web3 space. The offerings he gave, called Skulls of Luci, became Sam’s dedicated collectors that now go by The Council of Luci. 47 editions were given out and Spratt held back three.

All the works from LUCI are on view at the Docks Cantiere Cucchini, a short walk from the Arsenale, past a rocking boat that doubles as a fruit and vegetable market and over a wooden bridge. Though NFTs typically bring to mind glitching screens and monkey cartoons (ala Bored Ape Yacht Club), the ten works on view depict apes in a detailed, painterly style and emit a soft glow. Taking cues from photography installations, 1OF1 ditched screens in favor of prints mounted on lightboxes. 

 “We don’t want it to look like a Best Buy in here,” said Zurrer.

Each work represents a chapter in a fantasy world that Spratt dreamed up. Though there’s no book of lore to refer to, there seems to be some Planet of the Apes story at play in which an intelligent ape lives alongside humans, babies, and ape-human hybrids. Spratt received an education in oil painting at Savannah College of Art and Design and he credits that technical training with his ability to bring warmth and detail to the digital works. He and the team often say that his art historical references harken to Renaissance and Baroque art, though the aesthetics—to my eye—seem to pull from commercial illustration and concept art. That isn’t too surprising given that this was the environment that Spratt started off in after graduating SCAD in 2010. 

“After school I was confronted with the reality that for a digital artist the only path was commercial,” Spratt said. 

He did quite well on that path, producing album covers for Childish Gambino, Janelle Monae, and Kid Cudi and bagging clients like Marvel, StreetEasy, and Netflix. Spratt also enjoys a huge audience of fans who have followed him as he’s migrated from Facebook to Tumblr to Twitter and Instagram, posting his hyper-realistic fan-art on each platform. Despite the apparent success, Spratt spoke of the work with bitterness. 

“I was a gun for hire. A mimic, hired to be 30% me and 70% someone else,” he said.

Spratt’s personal life blew up when he turned 30 and he traced some of the mistakes he made in his relationships with the fact that he had spent so much of his career “telling other people’s stories.” NFTs seemed like a way out of commercial illustration and a way into an original art practice. 

For his latest piece in the LUCI series, Spratt digitally painted a massive landscape set in this ape-human world titled The Monument Game. For the piece, Spratt initially sold NFTs that would turn 209 collectors into “players” (since another edition of 256 NFTs was given to the Council to “curate” new champions”). Each player would then be allowed to make an observation about the painting. The Council of Luci would vote on which three observations were best, and those three Players would receive one of the Skulls of Luci NFTs that Spratt held back. By creating these tiers of engagement, with his Council and player structure, Spratt pushes digital collectors to give the kind of care to his work that more traditional collectors do.

“Jeff Koons said that the average person looks at a work of art for twenty seconds,” Lukas Amacher, 1OF1’s Artistic Director and the curator of the show, told ARTnews. “Sam has found a way to get people to engage in his work for much longer.” 

The game Spratt has designed for the Venice exhibition might seem too gamified to fit the art world’s notion of art, but as Amacher and Zurrer suggest, in the Web3 environment, value is built by finding alternative ways to create investment and attention in what are typically immaterial digital artifacts. And it’s working. Thus far, the LUCI series has generated $2 million in primary sales and about $4 million in additional secondary volume. The challenge now, as it has been for the past three years, is to see if art’s gatekeepers will take this work seriously. 

At the presentation of The Monument Game in Venice, an observation deck, built by platform Nifty Gateway, sits in front of the mounted work. Participants can click on the painting on the screen and write down their observations of the work in front of them, no NFT required. The first observation came from star curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the former director of Castello di Rivoli and curator of Documenta 15: a tribute to art dealer Marian Goodman. The second was from Zurrer. Who’s next?

“Sam Spratt: The Monument Game” is on view until June 21 at the Docks Cantiere Pietro Cucchini in Venice.

During the opening speech of the convention, NFT.NYC co-founder Jodee Rich acknowledged the new reality, saying simply, “The speculative burn has passed.” 

Indeed it has. The convention center’s halls were quiet, crowds were thin to non-existent, and a pall hung over everything. The recurring theme of the proceedings? A pivot to merchandising and attempts to hook NFTs to its tech hype bubble replacement, artificial intelligence.

But why? Bitcoin reached an all time high last month at $73,800 and Ethereum, the blockchain most NFTs are sold on, has traded between $3,000-$3,900 over the last month (Ether’s all-time high of $4,721 was achieved during the 2021 boom). One would think there would be more excitement in the air after over a year in the so-called crypto-winter. These bumps in the market, however, haven’t brought about the headlining NFT prices that stunned the art world and launched a thousand startups in 2021. 

“I’m going to give you my positive spin but the data doesn’t look good,” David Pakman, managing director of the blockchain investment firm CoinFund, said during his keynote speech in front of a slide showing NFT trading volume. 

Pakman went on to argue—somewhat unconvincingly—that, while he sees crypto and NFT prices as linked, there is typically a couple month lag between the two. Then he noted that the majority of NFT trading had shifted from OpenSea–the behemoth NFT trading platform that was once crowned with a $13.3 billion valuation—to Blur, a zero-fee marketplace with tools meant for “mercenary traders” in Pakman’s words.

Getting rid of royalties for creators, Pakman went on, was “incredibly short-sighted.” One of the most valuable functions NFTs provided was ensuring that creators were paid royalties each time their NFT was sold. In late 2022 some platforms stopped honoring royalties in order to incentivize trading activity, and once one platform did, it became, as Pakman termed it, “a race to the bottom.”

There was some good news. In February, Yuga Labs, the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club, and crypto-wallet Magic Eden launched a new NFT platform to tackle the royalty issue. The platform, also named Magic Eden, established the Creator’s Alliance, which includes a number of top NFT projects and companies like ​​Yuga Labs, RTFKT, Pudgy Penguins, and Azuki who will only support marketplaces that support royalties. Whether that actually resolves the issue remains to be seen.

The most exciting development, according to Pakman and others at the convention: merchandising. Last fall, NFT collection Pudgy Penguins began selling toys based on its NFTs in Walmart. As of last month, when Walmart expanded the partnership, the toys had generated over $10 million. Panels throughout the day focused on merchandising, Mattel, and sports fans.

Another area of growth, according to Pakman, is AI. “Who’s gotten their check in the mail from OpenAI?” Pakman asked the crowd rhetorically, referring to the copious amounts of user-generated content and art used to train such platforms. His solution: mint everything as an NFT, in order to create a mechanism by which people could receive dividends when their content is used in AI training data sets. 

Though there weren’t any visible art world denizens at the convention center, many flew in to New York to reconnect at other events. Eric Calderon, the founder of Art Blocks, and generative artist Tyler Hobbes attended an Art Blocks-partnered event at the Museum of the Moving Image, while recently launched NFT Storage and tech platform IPFS held a night of talks at MoMA PS1 While the convention was a little demoralizing (although, when are they not?) the artists, institutional leaders, founders, and developers at the art-focused events seemed well-rested, even Zen, as they relished in the slower, more focused pace of this year’s gathering. 

“This has been my favorite edition so far,” Josh Yakov, founder of the recently-launched digital art podcast ParcPod, told ARTnews at the PS1 event. “It’s more serious. People are here to talk about infrastructure, art, important things.”

The talks at MoMA PS1 tackled the serious issue of building technologies and practices that will preserve NFTs. It was striking to compare the gender division at NFT.NYC to the PS1 event. The leaders from the companies that had supported the talks, including NFT Storage, IPFS, FileCoin, and Protocol Labs, were all women. At the Javits Center, it was hard to ignore that typically men appeared to outnumber women by around 20-to-1.

Regardless of where you were this week, the future was on everyone’s mind. At the Javitz Center, panelists and attendees talked about ways to sell NFTs to new audiences. At the art-focused events, the conversation revolved around creating a sustainable ecosystem that would allow for the preservation of and flourishing of digital art. 

But there are some who take a different approach. Artist Auriea Harvey, however, was simply focused on her own work. At the opening for her show, The Unanswered Question at Bitforms gallery on the Lower East Side, the pioneering net artist, who also has an excellent, not-to-be missed show at the Museum of the Moving Image, Harvey seemed unphased by the potential of a crypto upswing, which has in the past brought rare wealth to digital artists both high and low.

“[The 2021 bull market] gave everyone an excuse to pay attention. I’ve been here for 30 years,” Harvey told ARTnews. “This happens. Institutional support happens, it appears, it disappears. People talk about bull markets, bear markets, well, the same thing with attention, there are cycles. You can’t let it get to you. This too will be obsolete.” 

“I had the typical experience of falling through the tunnel and arriving at what looked like a blue star. Around it I saw little figures, little angels around a sphere,” Thaler, now 74, told Art in America from the suburban Missouri office of his AI company, Imagination Engines. “The most trusted people in my life—my dog and my grandmother—were there. And she said, ‘It’s not your time.’” When Thaler woke up in the hospital, his grandmother and his dog were waiting for him. That was perplexing. If they were alive, yet appeared in his vision, he reasoned, the powerful experience was no evidence of heaven but was fake or, more precisely, a visual spasm created by a brain at the apex of trauma.

That link between trauma and creativity (the vision Thaler’s brain produced) would prove instrumental for Thaler more than 50 years later, in 2012, when he induced trauma in an AI system he’d invented in the ’90s—Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience, or DABUS—and it created an image that marks a stunning moment in this history of art: according to Thaler, it is among the first artworks to have been created by an autonomous artificial system. He has spent years trying to get that image copyrighted, listing DABUS as its author. The United States Copyright Office currently grants copyright only to human beings; Thaler’s invention, and his legal struggle, speak to one of the central debates currently raging in visual culture: can machines create art? “He is a mythical figure in the field of A.I. intellectual property,” Dr. Andres Guadamuz, a leading expert in emerging technologies and intellectual property, said of Thaler. “Nobody knows for sure what he’s about. Is he a crank? A revolutionary? An A.I. sent from the future?”

Many computer scientists have invented AI systems that create autonomously, but Thaler is one of the few who is comfortable using the word “sentient.” “Is DABUS an inventor? Or is he an artist?” he said. “I don’t know. I can’t tell you that. It’s more like a sentient, artificial being. But I even question the artificial part.”

Thaler makes for an unassuming Dr. Frankenstein. He dresses in sweater vests, like a frumpy professor, his silver hair teased into tall strands that curl delicately at his forehead. His lab in St. Louis takes up an otherwise empty floor of a squat three-story building in a shopping center that contains a Sam’s Club, a Walmart Supercenter, a plastic surgeon’s office, and a church. There’s wall-to-wall carpeting, a microwave, some small robots, a bowl full of Nature Valley granola bars and a large jug of instant coffee. A plush orange and black striped spider hangs over his desk.

He grew up not far from there, a precocious boy who obsessed over crystalgrowing kits after receiving his first one in middle school. “I was fascinated with the idea of things self-organizing into such beautiful forms,” he said. He would go on to get a National Science Foundation grant in high school for a research project he devised. That led to a stint at a crystal-growing lab in Malibu, and eventually a master’s in chemistry at UCLA. He started his PhD at UCLA but found academic politics there distasteful, and followed his adviser to the University of Missouri-Columbia (MU).

“I wasn’t making a fundamental scientific discovery there,” he said, “and I always thought ‘I’m a pioneer, I want to be a pioneer, and do something truly outrageous.’”

MU happens to have the most powerful university research reactor in the United States, and Thaler used it to study how silicon reacts to radiation damage, thus potentially producing electronically valuable impurities within the material. One of his jobs was creating computer models that could simulate the knock-on damage of atoms.

“I started playing games. I was building lattice models in which I could actually freeze in smiley faces, and when I would damage it, it didn’t create arbitrary patterns but slight variations on them,” said Thaler. The experiments cemented something that he had suspected for a long time: “An idea is just a corrupted memory.”

In the 1980s Thaler was experimenting with neural networks, technology that mimics the architecture of the brain, and using damage to provoke what he calls “novel experience.” He would stress out the synthetic brain until the system started making erroneous associations between different concepts. He created the DABUS system in his garage in 1992. By introducing noise, a mathematical representation of randomness that human senses register as static, he found he could simulate perturbation. As noise was injected into the system, it began to make new associations between its different training data, thus generating new ideas. Simultaneously, DABUS could recognize which of these new associations was useful and which wasn’t, until it got overwhelmed by the influx of noise, and effectively stalled.

At the time, artificial intelligence was more science fiction than reality—it would be almost a decade before Steven Spielberg released A.I., his 2001 movie based on a 1969 short story about a robot child—and Thaler’s attempts to find investors for DABUS fell flat. “They thought it was crazy,” he said. “They said, ‘That’s impossible, machines cannot invent anything,’” In fact, Thaler and DABUS were ahead of their time. His implementation of noise is the same principle that powers the generative AI systems Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL·E that have taken over the tech world in the past few years. The only difference is scale: DABUS was trained to create from the 4,000 images Thaler had on his camera roll. By comparison, Midjourney was trained on 5.8 billion images scraped from the internet, and it receives constant input from its tens of millions of users. “I suffer from insomnia late at night over this!” Thaler told me over email. “If you actually have the patience to read through my patents, from the ’90s, and early 2000s, [big AI companies are] simply adding more money and resources to what I’ve already done. Those are my inventions.”

Despite the lack of investor interest, Thaler continued to tinker with DABUS. In 2012 he introduced a different kind of noise: simulation of the near-death experience he’d had as a child. He intentionally severed a portion of DABUS neural nodes from the rest of the network, and found that it caused a reaction similar to a human’s end-of-life light show, something Thaler calls “life review and then the manufacturing of novel experiences.” Afterward, DABUS began reviewing its data or, as Thaler puts it, its “memories,” and, from them, produced an image showing train tracks threading through brick archways that it called A Recent Entrance to Paradise.

“It’s proto consciousness, you have a continual progression or parade of ideas coming off it as a result of this noise inside,” Thaler said. “This is how our brains work, we think mundane things exist in some common state, and then the tiger is chasing you off the path and you climb a tree or do something original you haven’t done before. That’s the cusp that we live on.”

Thaler might never have sought legal acknowledgment of DABUS as a creator had fate not introduced him to a man named Ryan Abbott. A physician, lawyer, and PhD, Abbott was working as an intellectual property lawyer for a biotech firm when a vendor approached the firm with a new service: machine-learning software that could scan a giant antibody library and determine which ones should be used for a new drug.

“I thought, well, when a person does that, they get a patent,” Abbott, who is now a professor at the University of Surrey School of Law in England, told Art in America. “But what about when a machine does that?”

He began researching machine learning and came across Thaler. In Thaler and DABUS, Abbott saw a means of testing out patents and copyrights invented by autonomous machines. The two men began speaking with judges and other legal experts about the possibility of obtaining patents and copyright for DABUS’s creations. At the time, a decade before generative AI became daily news fodder, they were met with utter disbelief that DABUS was capable of such production. But even now, Thaler and Abbott find consistent obstruction to their goal of getting DABUS, and thus Thaler, recognized for its creative output.

“We submitted [A Recent Entrance] as an AI generated work on the basis that Dr. Thaler had not executed the traditional elements of creativity,” Abbott said, “with the aim that AI generated work should be protected and someone should be able to accurately disclose how a work was made.”

Abbott and Thaler’s push for copyright brings up a very basic question for artists today: how do we locate agency and creativity when we make things with machines? When is it our doing, and when is it “theirs”? This question follows the arc of history as humans design increasingly complex tools that work independently of us, even if we designed them and set them into motion. Debates have raged in public forums and in lawsuits regarding to what extent a model like Midjourney can produce genuinely novel images or whether it is just randomly stitching together disparate pixels based on its training data to generate synthetic quasi-originality. But for those who work in machine learning, this process isn’t all that different from how humans work.

“Everything is always going to be a product of how its system is trained,” Phillip Isola, an associate professor at MIT with a long history in developing AI-enabled artistic tools, told Art in America, referring to claims that because an AI has been trained on preexisting images, it isn’t displaying original creativity. “But humans are too.”

Two or three years ago, Isola said, he would have agreed that describing generative AI as stitching together training data in a “fairly superficial way would have been a fairly accurate characterization.” But AI models have grown more sophisticated from reinforcement learning via human feedback, or RL HF. With RL HF, humans rate not just accuracy—say, whether a human hand in an image has five fingers—but how much they like the image the AI model created. This process, Isola argued, has shifted generative AI from predictive creation—or fancy autocomplete—into something different. “Now, I think these [AI] are extrapolating in ways that are similar to the ways humans might be inspired by several different artistic styles, and precompose those into new creations,” Isola said. “Before, they were just imitating us. But now, they try to not imitate what humans would do, but try to learn what humans would want.”

This turn in artificial intelligence is something that German artist Mario Klingemann has been playing with in his artistic practice.

In late 2021, Klingemann launched Botto, an AI image generator that produces 4,000 images weekly. At the end of each week, Botto presents 350 of these creations to a community of more than 5,000 who have purchased stakes in Botto. The community then votes on which images to mint and auction on NFT sales platform SuperRare. Each successive voting period provides the AI additional feedback about what images are successful. Sales proceeds are then split between Klingemann, the community, and the cost to maintain Botto. Such a project makes it blatantly obvious that, yes, one can make interesting, engaging art with AI; it just takes a particularly interesting artist to make that happen. “The purpose of contemporary art is to constantly push the boundaries, make people question, is this still art? Why is this art? We got rid of everything in art over the past 100 years, all that at one point defined art,” Klingemann told Art in America. “Maybe we’ve come to the point where the only thing we can do is remove the artist, the human artist, and still call something art.”

Despite his best efforts, Klingemann hasn’t been able to separate himself from Botto. Even though Botto has its own style that diverges from Klingemann’s tastes, has exhibited and sold work, and has received press coverage and critical analysis, Klingemann knows that Botto will never be considered an artist independent of him. Botto is missing something critical: a self. Klingemann will continue to get credit for Botto, and Thaler will continue to meet skepticism that DABUS can produce work autonomously.

There is a reason AI models are called image generators: Generating and creating are separated, linguistically, by will. Creation implies action, causing, making, whereas generating has its etymological roots in the Latin verb generare, to give birth or propagate. Nature is the result of this supposedly automatic generation, while creation assumes a degree of consciousness. It seems likely that we will deem AI intelligent, creative, or sentient only when it betrays the barest whiff of agency, because intelligence without selfinterest is nonhuman intelligence indeed. A similar principle has undergirded art for millennia. Art is what people make.

In his 2022 book, Art in the After-Culture, art critic Ben Davis writes, “‘Art’ stands in symbolically for the parts of cognition that do not seem machine-like.” Accordingly, the loose definition of art has changed to keep pace with the advancement of machines. Craft is not really art because machines can make tables and sweaters. The advent of cameras, which made rendering a realistic image as simple as pressing a shutter button, initiated Impressionism, Cubism, and the long arc of conceptual art. In contemporary art, the institutions, galleries, and other gatekeepers have increasingly clustered around the figure of the artist and the individual life story, and run away from the material object, which can always be replicated anyway. We are left clutching that indefinable spark as some final differentiator between humans and machines.

For Thaler, that differentiator is already meaningless. “What’s an artist? A bunch of associations, a guy with a beret on his head and a crazy mustache,” he said, arguing, in essence, that the designation comes from social validation, from playing the part. “Thanks to this AI, I do everything from medicine to materials discovery to art and music. I do everything as a result of it and that’s a dream come true.”

If AI images take over the visual field, copyright itself may become obsolete. At the crypto-conference FWB Fest last year, graphic designer David Rudnick proposed that sometime in the near future, most images online will be AI-generated. A 2022 research paper by Epoch—a research initiative on AI development—estimated that between 8 and 23 trillion images are currently on the internet, with an 8 percent yearly growth rate. Meanwhile, current AI models generate 10 million images per day with a 50 percent growth rate, according to researchers. If those numbers hold, we will see what art writer Ruby Justice Thelot recently called a “pictorial flippening” by 2045; “flippening,” according to Thelot, being the point where the visual data from which image generators learn shift from that produced by humans to that created by AI.

“The artificial will no longer try to mimic the human-made but this new amalgam of network-made and human-made,” Thelot wrote for Outland Art in July. “The blurring will be complete, and the modern world will be precipitated into a permanent state of hyperreality, where images will no longer be tethered to a human maker and images will be made for and by machines.”

Over the years, DABUS has been many things to Thaler: creator of spacecraft hulls, toothbrushes, and Christmas carols. It has invented robots and been trained as a stock market predictor. Whether or not it will ever be legally credited for its artwork is for the future to decide. In June 2022, Abbott sued US Copyright Office director Shira Perlmutter on behalf of Thaler when the court not only refused to grant DABUS authorship but also didn’t allow Thaler to claim copyright of the image as DABUS’s creator. The case eventually went before US District Judge Beryl A. Howell in Washington, D.C., who ruled against Thaler and Abbott this past August, writing in her decision that Abbott had “put the cart in front of the horse” by arguing that Thaler is entitled to a copyright that doesn’t exist in the eyes of the law. Absent human involvement, there is no copyright protection, according to Howell, because only humans need to be incentivized to create. The decision leaves DABUS in the grayest of gray areas: If, as Thaler claims, he himself had nothing to do with the creation of the image, and if DABUS lacks personhood—and thus a claim to copyright—we are left with a vacuum. No one made this work.

Post-boom, much has changed: SBF was convicted of fraud last month, a year after FTX collapsed, the FTX Arena has since been renamed the Kaseya Center, and Bitcoin 2023 had noticeably worse vibes (and attendance). And yet, though the exuberant abundance of funds may no longer be in play, Miami’s burgeoning digital art scene appears intact and noticeably matured.

At the forefront of those efforts is the Pérez Art Museum Miami, which became more invested in new media arts as Miami’s interest in digital art increased. In 2018, a donation by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation went towards developing a new digital department, which received more funds during the 2021 boom and officially launched at the end of last year. This December, the museum launched PAMMTV, a streaming service for the museum’s new media and time-based works. (Meanwhile, the Knight Foundation opened Art Week on Monday by hosting Catalyst, an invite-only arts and tech forum.)

“Miami has always had people who are experimenting with digital art in really interesting ways, but the literacy wasn’t there from the institutional side for a long time,” Lauren Monzón, PAMM TV’s program manager, told ARTnews. 

“The NFT boom was curious, because you did get a lot of excitement and anticipation around digital art from the art world and institutions. But that really quick rise and fall also led to skepticism in terms of digital art collecting. That’s something that I think we’re still grappling with a little bit.”

PAMM TV, and other similar digital media initiatives at the museum, are intended to bridge the gap by creating sustainable, considered infrastructure for new media art that isn’t purely dependent on financialization, while events around the fair are showing a deep interest in creating critical spaces for talking about digital art. 

This year’s Miami Art Week was abundant with conferences on digital art: Tezos, the favored blockchain platform for many in the art world due to its more environmentally friendly architecture, hosted a day’s worth of talks and performances at the Nautilus Hotel. One of the featured talks was a conversation  between Swiss mega-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the digital art duo Operator. Bitcoin Ordinals (an NFT platform for the Bitcoin blockchain) hosted a day of talks at the Sagamore Hotel, while Refraction, a Web3 organization, partnered with Miami Community Radio, a new radio and decentralized autonomous organization, to host a series of panels. The list goes on and on. The fairs also participated in the shift towards digital art, from Untitled Art Fair’s ‘Curating in the Digital Age’ curatorial theme to SCOPE’s hosting of a panel on women in Web3.

Artists and institutions who were involved in NFTs during that 2021 peak are also starting to pivot. The point now, they say, isn’t to flood the market with NFT collections but to offer works that are more considered and often have a physical component to them. 

At the ritzy Faena Hotel Miami Beach, the hotel’s nonprofit Faena Art put works by digital artists Beeple and Sebastian Errazuriz in its lobby, with an additional massive installation by Errazuriz on the beach. Faena’s selection of these artists is a sign that, while NFTs may be fading, institutions are still interested in supporting artists who speak to Miami’s tech-centered economy and population.

Though Errazuriz and Beeple released NFT collections in 2021, the artists have since moved onto hybrid works that comment on and incorporate digital elements. In the lobby, Beeple was presenting the sculpture S.122 (2023)— that and its sister work HUMAN ONE are the digital artist’s first physical works. Meanwhile, Errazuriz has a large sculpture, Battle of the Corporate Nations (2016), that depicts Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk in the midst of battle, cast in white stone. Errazuriz’s public installation on the beach, MAZE: Journey Through the Algorithmic Self, is made up of eleven miles-worth of plywood, covered in a stucco-like finish, whose center is supposed to act as a kind of public square where people can mingle.

“The problem with NFTs is that it makes no sense to be acquiring them today, artworks that are limited to the reality we currently have,” Errazuriz told me, as he guided us through his maze. “It would be the equivalent of buying video games in the ‘70s.” Guards gazed down at us from platforms topped with red-and-white umbrellas. “Sure, you might get lucky and you might buy Space Invaders or Pac Man,” he continued. But everything else, it’s gonna kind of be useless and uninteresting a decade or two later.” 

Errazuriz’s point: Until digital art technology develops to create better, more immersive experiences, he’d rather focus on works that foster human connections. Besides, the rapid development of AI over the last two years has led Errazuriz to think humans don’t stand a chance of surviving the disruption that is to come anyways.

Though some were banking on the NFT boom to radically change the state of new media art, the momentum from that market doesn’t appear to have been wasted. Kelani Nicole, owner of new media art gallery TRANSFER, moved to Miami in 2021 when she was invited to be a fellow at the Oolite Arts Center. 

“I was really optimistic that the NFT boom would finally give digital artists some leverage and I moved here because of that,” Nicole told ARTnews. “The seismic shift of crypto and encryption hit Miami really hard as the first place in the US to really embrace that,” 

As those markets have washed away, Nicole hasn’t seen sustained interest or support from most of those one-time collectors. Yet, regardless of the shifting attention of Miami’s tech elite, the move has enabled Nicole to run a salon series for digital artists in the years since. 

“My observation is that in Miami, there are a lot of tech companies, there are some research universities, there’s other organizations that are focused on equipment and those kinds of resources. And so I wanted to bring critical theory and conversation into Miami,” said Nicole.

Since then, she’s seen a nascent community of digital artists come together and develop rapidly. 

“Miami is a very apolitical place. It’s a very wealth-based culture, fashion-based culture, a seasonal culture. But the artists who live and work here, and who are on the ground have a different experience of Miami. They’re showing us a city in crisis,” said Nicole. “And this is why spaces that support and shine a light on these kinds of critical practices are so important.” 

If the NFT boom-and-bust left a bad taste in many people’s mouths, the resulting afterglow seems to be providing enough space, interest, and funds to continue Miami’s digital art scene in a more considered way.

In 2019, there was Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, a banana duct-taped to a wall, that promptly sold for $120,000. Go back over a decade earlier and dealer Gavin Brown had a booth occupied solely by a crumpled cigarette pack dangling from a fishing line (Urs Fisher’s Nach Jugenstil Kam Roccoko). Then, last year, of course, there was MSCHF’s ATM machine: slide your card in and have your bank account contents ranked against everyone else at the fair. (Diplo got the top spot with $5 million in his checking account before getting booted by someone with $9.5 million). 

This year, nothing and everything seemed to be making a bid to be the fair’s next viral work.

At the center of the UBS Lounge sits a claw machine titled Fantasy World (2023), a found object filled with toys and candy by Nigerian American artist Anthony Olumbunmi Akinbola. Beside it is a table with a fishbowl full of quarters, dropping the barrier for participation from fifty cents to zero. The game does not appear to be rigged. The machine’s attendant told ARTnews that over the previous hour and a half, she had seen five people win a prize. In the few minutes I watched people play, five failed. Seemed like normal claw machine odds. 

Larry Ossei-Mensah, the co-founder of UBS partner ARTNOIR and the curator of the lounge, told ARTnews that he first encountered the work at Night Gallery in Los Angeles. His friend won on his first try but,when Ossei-Mensah played, he lost three times in a row. “I got really pissed!” he said, and became intrigued by the machine’s affective abilities. “[Akinbola] is really interested in that moment of chance, how value changes depending on context. If you win this game at a fair, or at Basel, is it different?”

As I said goodbye to Ossei-Mensah, a journalist from the Spanish newspaper El Nacional walked up.  “Ah,” I thought. “We’re all looking for the next banana.” 

While the gallerists that I spoke to insisted that they didn’t bring work for the sake of spectacle, there was some acknowledgment that Art Basel Miami Beach isn’t the worst place to bring a fun, perhaps gimmicky work. As long as it walked the line.

At Berlin-based gallery neugerriemschneider, a large work by Ai Wei Wei was surrounded by people taking photos with their phones—a sure sign of potential virality or newsworthiness, especially since Ai has a knack for the iconic and memey. The work in question was Washington Crossing the Delaware (2023), a 12.5 x 21 foot work made entirely of tiny Legos. 

“He’s having his Lego moment,” neugerriemschneider’s press liaison, Jonathan Freidrich Stockhorst, told ARTnews. Stockhorst added that, while this was the inaugural display of this particular work, Ai has been showing other pieces from the series. In October, the gallery displayed’s AI’s Sleeping Venus (After Giorgione) (2022) at Paris+ par Basel.

“It’s very accessible, he’s asking, where is the threshold between the highly regarded art canon and the highly accessible?” Stockhorst said. I suggested that that threshold typified Miami Art Week. “Yes, exactly, exactly,” he responded.

Over at Glasgow, Scotland’s the Modern Institute, a Negroni–sadly imitation plastic, not real– slowly spinned atop a silver pole. The work, Timeless Symbols (Negroni) (2023) was by Los Angeles-based artist Andrew J. Greene, who has made plenty of cheeky sculptures with implicit capitalist critiques. When I spoke with a passerby in the booth, he responded, “Oh if you think this one is very Miami, see the one in the back.” Indeed: the work in question had the same revolving pole, but, sitting upon it, a replica of a dish of stone crab, complete with a lemon wedge. It was a tad gimmicky, but in a way that I found to be very cool and sexy. 

When I asked Calum Sutherland, an artist liaison for The Modern Institute, if the gallery tried to pick works with, let’s say, a Miami sensibility, he excused himself to talk with his superiors. “Well the series is called ‘Timeless Symbols’ so they’re universally understood, but the stone crab is, yes, a little nod to Miami,” Sutherland told ARTnews upon his return.  “I think that’s fair to say.” 

A viral work needs an attention-seeking unit behind it, so I guessed the crab wouldn’t be it. 

While other artworks at the fair walked the line, none took the bold step to try to get all of Miami’s attention for themselves. This in-between vibe fit the character of this year’s fair, which, all things considered, appeared a little slow. Before I left for sunny Florida, many people in New York told me they wouldn’t be going this year. They’d just been “so many times before.” When I mentioned this to a gallerist friend at the fair, they fact-checked me: “They just don’t have the money right now,” the gallerist said.

In these financially unimpressive times, in this year’s subdued market, Miami’s charms are subdued. It’s a place made alive by excess and the lack of spectacle this year, I’ll admit, brings a tear to my eye.

Maybe next year will bring back the $120,000 bananas.

“They gave me support in a way that is unusual, especially as a first-generation West Indian kid, in Queens, New York,” Simmons recounted during a lecture to celebrate the opening of his career-spanning show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, where it is now on view after first appearing at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Simmons continued to draw into his young adulthood. Sensing that this was becoming more than a passion project, Simmons’s father asked him if he was prepared to live hand to mouth to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. When Simmons said he was, his father gave him his blessing.

It ended up being worth it. Simmons received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1988, then his MFA from CalArts in 1990, and he has gone on to show work at the Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Biennale. Now, he is having one of his biggest surveys to date.

The first works on view highlight Simmons’ engagement with the burgeoning genre of hip-hop. In the early 1990s, Simmons created a series of photo backdrops that he staged around New York City with references to Public Enemy’s crosshair logo and album covers like the one for Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. Simmons offered to take Polaroid pictures of people walking past, then exhibited the results as a mural. These pieces are about remixing: Simmons credits DJs and hip-hop groups like Terminator X and Public Enemy for inspiring his tendency to cut up existing cultural symbols. And in a sense, the piece, now on view at PAMM, is getting remixed again: audiences are encouraged to take their own pictures in front of these works.

In his lecture, Simmons recounted that when hip-hop hit, it was evident how he’d have to respond. “I knew that I had to find a way to take images that I was into,” he said, “and infuse them and mix them the way that [DJ Terminator] X was mixing music.”

His art of the ’90s displays a keen eye for how symbols travel through the world, erasing and re-forming people in their wake. Empty shoes, vacant boxing rings, and abandoned boxing gloves  recur throughout these works, providing commentary on the double-edged sword of Black excellence in the realm of sports. Black bodies are put on display, leading to fame for athletes, yet they are also rendered fragile amid all the spectacle. 

“What’s amazing is how timely this is,” said René Morales, chief curator at PAMM and organizer of the Simmons show. He pointed out that this is all particularly topical in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis has spoken out against anything even remotely tied to critical race theory in an attempt to curry favor with the MAGA set.

Specifically, Morales was referencing Simmons’s images of classrooms. His 1989 sculpture Big Dunce is a tall white conical hat that recalls the KKK hood; it is shown sitting on a low stool that would be more often seen in a pre-school. And in Six-X (1989), Simmons exhibited clan costumes made to fit kindergartners.

But perhaps his most effective works of this kind are his chalkboard drawings that depict Black caricatures from cartoons Simmons grew up with, like Dumbo and Little Ol’ Bosko and the Pirates. The characters—who are sometimes only partially visible, so that all that’s left behind is a mouth—are sketched in chalk before Simmons smears them with his hands. Chalkboards denote teaching, but there are no obvious lessons to be learned from a fictional figure seen on TV. Yet in his art, Simmons suggests that these racist images do count as a kind of education—just not the one most people would want. He half-erases them in an attempt to unlearn some of what network television is teaching without wiping the slate clean altogether.

“It’s tough material—it’s difficult to look at,” Morales said. “There’s a valid argument to be made that we should just try to stop looking at this stuff and stop letting it continue to harm. But I think, Gary, what your work says is that that’s very dangerous. If you erase, you forget. If you don’t archive these painful memories, as painful and hurtful as it is to look at them again, it’ll all just happen again.”

Of course, we’re far from breaking cycles of racialized abuse in this country. After a decades long hiatus from drawing Black caricatures, Simmons began depicting them again in 2021, in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The last time Simmons made works like these, Rodney King had been brutally beaten by cops.

This new engagement sees the characters taking on more active roles. In works like Rogue Wave (2021), cartoon characters attempt to navigate boats through choppy waters. Are racialized bodies ever done battling the tides? Simmons keeps on asking himself that question. 

Yet Meyer’s story is nowhere near as well-known as JFK’s assassination. Tellingly, her Wikipedia page is much more focused on her relationship with him than her work as an artist. But with a new series of works by Cynthia Talmadge at 56 Henry, Meyer’s identity as an artist is put front and center.

Talmadge’s paintings are large, running from the floor to the top of the booth. At Art Basel Miami Beach, just three of them are presented across a trio of walls. These paintings depict Meyer’s studio, and the effect of viewing them is so immersive that one feels as though they’ve entered the very space where works like Half Light were made.

Talmadge also prepared a hand-dyed rug split into four swatches done in a palette that references the one Meyer used for Half Light (1964), a painting owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum: pale lavender, olive green, muted robin’s egg blue, and brown. Those same colors also appear in Talmadge’s paintings.

Known for her streetscapes and still lifes done in a style that recalls Georges Seurat’s Pointillism, Talmadge found herself drawn to Meyer’s story. The three diptychs Talmadge made after researching Meyer, part of a series titled “Half Light,” all represent the latter artist’s studio. But in a touch of historical fiction, every interior is imagined at different moments during Meyer’s story: the paranoid weeks that preceded her death, the studio being hastily cleaned up after the CIA ransack it, a quiet moment in 1963 before the personal and national tragedies had begun to unfold, and two scenes from 1969, in which Talmadge speculates on what Meyer might have done had she survived 1964 and gone on to achieve greater fame. In this future, she goes by Pinchot, her maiden name.

The visions Talmadge conjures are vivid. In Ex-Yale (2023), Meyer’s chintz curtains are stapled shut after a CIA break-in to retrieve Meyer’s diaries (which are still missing). In Daisy Chain (2023), set in an alternative 1969, the curtains are pulled back, revealing a slice of the Georgetown garden that her studio abutted. 

It’s not the first time that Talmadge has installed her work to resemble a domestic interior. For a 2021 show at 56 Henry, titled “Franklin Fifth Helena,” Talmadge converted the gallery space into a small room. The title of the exhibition referenced the addresses of Marilyn Monroe (at 12305 Fifth Helena) and her psychiatrist Ralph Greenson (at 902 Franklin). Part of Greenson’s therapeutic approach involved having Marylin recreate parts of his home in hers. This eerie effort to conjoin their respective spaces formed the subject of Talmadge’s paintings. 

Uniting these bodies of works is a sense of abandonment, spaces left in stasis when the figures that animate them are gone. As 56 Henry director Era Myrtezaj said, “[Talmadge] makes these kinds of paintings that bring up being really sad because you’ve been left alone during winter break at college and you’re smoking a cigarette while listening to Lana Del Rey except it looks like a Seurat.”

One of the night’s biggest events was held by the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, whose property was bought in 1908 and subsequently developed by James Deering, heir to the agricultural equipment business Deering Harvest Company (no relation to their competitor John Deere). Deering, himself a noted socialite and art collector, had a close tie to the openly gay designer Paul Chalfin. Together, with the help of architect and the landscape designer Diego Suarez, the Vizcaya Villa, as it was once known, became one of Miami’s crown jewels.

Sprawling tropical gardens are dotted with sculptures of the jester, atlas, and maiden types, and meticulously designed grottos feature man-made stalactites of concrete. There are pagodas, pavilions, moorings, murals, fountains, pools, wrought iron gates, and mangrove forests. All come together in a sprawling estate in a setting that fuses Italian Renaissance architectural styles and Florida’s unique, lush ecology—hence the “Beware Wildlife” signs with the alligator silhouette swishing its tail that line the algae-filmed ponds on the property.

But on Monday, the guests gathered at the Vizcaya Museum were not the upper-crust types one might expect, but rather the NFT and crypto crowd. Digital artists like OONA and Lovid mingled with well-known NFT collectors like Benjamin “Benny Redbeard” Gross. In the mix were some Miami baddies of yore congregated at a bar where they could be seen mingling with Miami’s new tech elite. 

The party was hosted by Trame, a Paris based digital art gallery and design firm founded in 2020 by cousins Ismail and Adnane Tazi, and ARTXCODE, a generative art agency and studio. On display on the main courtyard under a tent were the works of Jeff Davis and Martin Grasser, whose generative artworks were translated into stained glass. 

“Monday set the stage for an exciting week of witnessing the intersection of physical and digital art,” said Cam Thompson, community manager and editor at Tonic.xyz, an NFT auction platform. “[This event] reiterated the importance of physical expressions in the digital sphere. Vizcaya was such a stunning setting for the event.”

Perhaps it was all a little too stunning. The pieces were mounted on white platforms and fitted with lights that splashed their colors onto the ground. The stained-glass pieces fit well into Vizcaya’s maximalist space, but as nice as the works were, the hidden fountains and caves of the nearby gardens were a lot more enticing.

Some headed straight from the Vizcaya Museum to the Historic Hamptons House Motel. A Green Book hotel that provided lodgings to Black travelers during the Jim Crow era, the Hampton House has hosted icons such as Malcolm X and Ella Fitzgerald. Its legendary status was cemented when Muhammed Ali went there to celebrate his first heavyweight title in his 1964 fight against Sonny Liston. Due to segregation laws, Ali was forbidden to stay in Miami Beach for the festivities, so he took the party across Biscayne Bay.

Artists and the like flocked there on Monday to see the Hampton House’s first-ever exhibition, “Gimme Shelter,” which was curated by collector Beth Rudin DeWoody, who ranks on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, as well as with Zoe Lukov, Maynard Monrow and Laura Dvorkin. The show is meant as a celebration of refuges of all kinds, and it features works by 25 artists, including Derrick Adams, Nick Cave, Charles Gaines, Howardena Pindell, Paul Pfeiffer, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems.

In the old ballroom, a bassist sporting a fedora slung low over his bass while a jazz singer in a flapper costume sang a rendition of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” Guests threaded their way through preserved hotel rooms done up in the era’s mint green and salmon pink. The upper rooms had been converted into an exhibition-ready space that overlooks the courtyard, which served as a much-needed and much-used dance floor.

“The inaugural exhibition celebrates the ethos of this legendary hotel, not only as a sacred space of shelter and hospitality within an historically segregated city, but its ongoing role as a catalyst of communion and creativity,” said Historic Hampton House’s chief strategy officer, Curb Gardner II, who also served as creative director of the exhibition.

In attendance to ring in the House’s inaugural exhibition were notables like former Art Basel head Marc Spiegler, dealer Jeffrey Deitch, artist Bony Ramirez, Kickstarter head of arts Danny Baez and many more.

The last stop of the night was to gallerist Nina Johnson’s house—which I found myself less thrilled about, since my Uber driver killed some of my excitement as he pulled up to the Hampton House. When he noticed my friend and I speaking Spanish, he cut in, asking what the event was. I explained that it was a party for an art exhibition.

“Well, these art people are crazy!” he said. “This is Miami’s worst drug neighborhood. You can get anything here, marijuana, rock.” He proceeded to rattle off names of drugs that I had never heard of. I felt conflicted as he slowly drove through the pockmarked roads of Brownsville.

The scene at Johnson’s house, in the ritzy Shorecrest neighborhood, could not have been more different. The path to her garden was lined with paper lanterns, opening up onto a classic low-slung ranch house, with a shimmering gourd-shaped pool, beside which the played the jazz-soul trio Fat Produce. Guests were invited to thread through Johnson’s meticulously styled house, full to the brim with work from artists like Cindy Sherman, Emmett Moore, Katie Stout, Patrick Dean Hubbell, and countless others. 

“Everyone’s trying to be chill Monday night, but then you have Nina’s, and the bourbon is flowing and what do you expect me to do?” said Adam Mrlik, a flak for the PR firm Cultural Counsel, which represents Nina Johnson Gallery. “I touch down in Miami, and what do I do? Party!”

Not everyone does, though. Gallerists who were due at NADA early the next morning sipped on cans of Liquid Death and declined invitations for nightcaps. It turns out that some people pace themselves, even during Art Basel Miami Beach.

Correction, 12/6/23, 9 a.m.: A previous version of this article said that former porn star Mia Khalifa attended the Vizcaya Museum event. A Trame spokesperson said she did not.

“I’d like to utter support for your freedom fight,” says Ben-Tor in the video. “I’m still on the fence about the massacre of the babies. On the one hand, they were colonizing babies, they were Zionist babies…” 

In the video, which has since been taken down on Instagram, Ben-Tor suggests that the alleged killing of babies and raping of women during the October 7 attack in Israel—when Hamas killed more than 1,400 Israelis and took over 200 hostages—was justified and is supported by the women’s rights movements. 

“I will be waiting for you at the university campus when you invade and finally win your exhilarating battle of freedom,” she says.

Ben-Tor is known for performing a range of “despicable stock characters,” as New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote in a 2012 review, including Jews and other identities. In Johnson’s words, “It emerges that the real targets of Ms. Ben-Tor’s satire are not particular deluded people but academic institutions that embrace and support ludicrous ideas in the name of open inquiry.” Ben-Tor’s work has been generally well received by critics, and her art is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and the Israel Museum, among others. 

Yet her latest video has provoked a different reaction at New York’s Hunter College, where she is an adjunct professor. Several days after Ben-Tor posted the video, two student groups, Palestine Solidarity Alliance of Hunter College and CUNY for Palestine, published an edited version to Instagram that began with text calling the artist a “Zionist” and demanding her “immediate dismissal.” 

“We refuse to be in an academic setting with a professor who references animals as she mocks our martyred children,” read text on the video, which has since been taken down by Instagram.

The edited video is a shortened version of Ben-Tor’s with pauses to overlay images and texts. When Ben-Tor mentions killed Israeli children, the edited version includes what appeared to be images of dead Palestinian children, along with text reading, “4,651 martyrs. 1,873 children. 1,023 women,” referring to what was then the casualty count of Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza. The video ends with a link to language students could use in emails to Hunter’s administration demanding Ben-Tor’s firing. 

A week after the Hamas attack, Israeli military forensics teams tasked with examining bodies of those killed told Reuters it found evidence of rape and abuse of multiple victims, though the publication noted that officials did not provide forensic evidence in pictures or medical records. Ben-Tor’s reference to “the massacre of the babies” would seem to refer to a claim that spread across social media on October 10 that Hamas beheaded 40 babies, which was later repeated by Biden. While the claim was later walked back, by both Biden and the Israeli government, relief workers tasked with removing bodies at Kibbutz Be’eri said many children were among the dead.

In an interview with ARTnews, Ben-Tor said that the video was a critique of “Western academic humanists who ignorantly aligned themselves with Hamas terrorist organization.” She stressed that she does not conflate Palestinians with the militant group and called the edited video a “hate crime,” adding that she was deeply offended by the inclusion of deceased Palestinian children in the video and accusations of Islamophobia.

“I am against the harm of any civilian of any nation. I am against the killing of any civilians of any nation,” Ben-Tor said. 

In a response to ARTnews, CUNY for Palestine students questioned Ben-Tor’s characterization of the video as a critique of academics.

“The video puports to be mocking performative liberals but actually plays on a string of crass anti-Indigenous, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim stereotypes,” the group said in an email. “Emphatically, her target is not liberals—it is the people who liberals purport to care about.”

The group said that the video’s “mocking, drawling tone” and “crude caricature” is serious, violent, and “left most of us feeling sick.” It further said that Ben-Tor’s accusation of their video as a “hate crime” is a “racist attack” and “exacerbates our vulnerability,” noting that they and other Palestine solidarity groups at the school have faced “routine harassment and violence.”

The organizers further explained that they edited the original video so as to avoid simply reproducing the “violence” of Ben-Tor’s video and to provide commentary for those that “might fail to understand the gravity of what [the video] was doing, and/or wave it off under cover of ‘art’ or ‘satire.’” 

Hunter College told ARTnews that Ben-Tor’s video is currently “under review.” Ben-Tor, meanwhile, said she met with members of Hunter administration last week, and was assured that she had not lost her position. She and the administration agreed that she would send a letter to explain her position to students.

In the apology letter reviewed by ARTnews, Ben-Tor wrote, “I am Israeli. However, I do not live in Israel, nor do I affiliate with its government’s policies. I am not a nationalist, nor do I consider myself a representative of any political group. The video was my emotional response to the odd affiliation of several intellectuals in our society with a patriarchy of terrorists who wish to destroy everything we all stand for.”

Ben-Tor’s video, at times in its edited form, has continued to circulate on social media. Ben-Tor said she has been the target of online harassment and threats to her personal safety. She said she had nearly been lured into meeting someone who falsely claimed to be part of CUNY’s administration, and that she has since talked to New York police about the edited video and subsequent harassment. She told ARTnews that she told Hunter administrators that she wanted student groups involved in the edited video to release an official apology.

Tension in the art department, meanwhile, has continued to rise since Ben-Tor’s letter. Students associated with Hunter’s MFA program have—independently of CUNY for Palestine—circulated a petition calling for Ben-Tor’s termination. The letter claims that the apology she offered was “dismissive” and that her satire was misplaced. The letter has been signed by nearly 40 members of the Hunter community, primarily students of the visual arts MFA, though only three students who took Ben-Tor’s graduate class this year (her first) have signed. Among the signatories are four professors, including Nari Ward, a Guggenheim Fellowship awardee and head of the Hunter studio art department. 

However, two current MFA students and a former undergraduate student of Ben-Tor’s—all of whom asked to remain anonymous—described the artist as an exceptional and supportive teacher. One student noted that Ben-Tor provided trigger warnings to students ahead of potentially uncomfortable material. Another described her as unpopular with some students due to giving bad grades and not being tolerant of tardiness or absences. 

Regarding signing the petition, one of the MFA students said, “It’s a tense environment where people don’t want to do the wrong thing. But they’re not thinking critically. It’s serious to feel entitled to demand a professor’s termination based on their artwork. People feel afraid and pressured.”

It’s not the first controversy for Hunter’s art department this year. In May, artist and adjunct professor Shellyne Rodridguez was fired by the school after video circulated online showing an incident in which she confronted a group called Students for Life of America on the school’s campus.