The Museum of Modern Art has acquired artworks by two major digital artists, Refik Anadol and Ian Cheng.
The Anadol piece, Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA (2022), is a generative artwork that uses the museum’s visual archive to produce a machine-learning model that interprets and reimagines images of artworks in MoMA’s collection. The work went on view late last year and was recently extended through October 29.
Since going on view, the piece has drawn sizable crowds. Critics have eyed the work with suspicion, with New York’s Jerry Saltz comparing it to a lava lamp. But Lloyd Wise, in Artforum, defended the work for the way it dialogued with modernism.
The piece, which includes a companion NFT, was donated to the museum by tech entrepreneur Ryan Zurrer, one of the most prolific collectors of digital art, through his 1OF1 Collection, along with the RFC Collection, led by Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile and Desiree Casoni.
In a recent roundtable interview with ARTnews for its annual Top 200 Collectors issue, Zurrer said, “I tip my hat to the folks at MoMA for understanding the cultural zeitgeist of the moment. Unsupervised went up two weeks before ChatGPT went public. AI is the defining topic of the moment, and MoMA captured that. I’m excited to donate this work to MoMA. But I need to acknowledge that this isn’t just a donation from me and [collector] Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile, but from Refik. He is bringing the servers and screens and the other components. The NFT is one part of this conceptual artwork that belongs to MoMA now.”
