Four years after the artist Beeple (real name Mike Winkelmann) sold his record-breaking NFT (non-fungible token) Everydays: The First 5000 Days (2021) for $60.2m ($69.3m with fees) at Christie’s, the art world has seen an ebb and flow of commercial and institutional interest in digital and new media art. While there has been a significant drop in NFT transactions, the recent launches of two galleries in New York that specialise in digital art—the NFT platform SuperRare’s physical marketplace Offline and a new endeavour called Heft Gallery—offer insight into growing support for the discipline.
Both located in the Lower East Side neighbourhood, Offline and Heft Gallery blur the boundaries between Web3 and traditional art venues. The physical space for the NFT giant SuperRare, Offline, quietly launched on the Bowery in April, hosting short exhibitions and programmes before its grand opening in July. While SuperRare had organised pop-up shows in the past, with Offline it saw an opportunity to tap into its platform’s wealth of Web3 artists and bring their work into a physical space.
The inaugural show at Offline, SuperRare’s new IRL marketplace, featured works such as Neal Cashman’s Projector (2025) Courtesy of the artist and Offline
“Digital art takes time and patience for it to mature and grow,” Offline’s director Mika Bar-On Nesher tells The Art Newspaper. “Part of that growth is experiencing digital art outside of screens.”
For Offline’s inaugural exhibition, Mythologies for a Spiritually Void Time, the guest curators X.S. Hou and Jack Wedge selected artists who take an expansive approach to digital art not just as a discipline, but also as a tool to create physical work. The pieces on view included painting, sculpture and animation, many of which were available for purchase with cryptocurrency and backed by the blockchain.
Heft Gallery opened its inaugural show in April, which drew a mix of Web3 enthusiasts and traditional collectors Photo: @larufoto Luis Ruiz
Throughout the run of the show, Offline organised programmes to bring its community of artists and collectors together and hopefully attract new ones. These events also help the gallery clarify misgivings about digital art, which Bar-On Nesher likens to the resistance faced by any discipline that challenges the public perception of art and the traditional white cube model.
“Even movies frightened people when they were first invented,” she says. “Anything that stretches how we think things should be is controversial. Every art movement goes through cycles of dismissal and acceptance.”
Something for everyone
Nearby on Broome Street, Heft Gallery mirrors Offline’s mission. Founded by the curator and artist Adam Heft Berninger, the gallery opened in April and focuses on artists using systems, such as artificial intelligence (AI), code and algorithms.
Heft Gallery’s inaugural show included Margaret Murphy’s AI-generated photograph APB (2024) Courtesy of the artist and Heft Gallery
“The big thing about having a gallery space is not just to show the works in a physical environment, but also to have conversations,” says Berninger. “It’s so hard to convey the process, the thinking of the artist and why something is important culturally in a DM.”
Artists using technologies and systems are not niche—they have a rich historyAdam Heft Berninger, Founder, Heft Gallery
Like at Offline, Heft Gallery’s programming reflects a rejection of the notion that digital art exists solely on a screen. “Digital art, generative art and systems art can manifest in infinite ways—embroidery on canvas, oil paintings, bronze sculptures, all sorts of things,” Berninger says. “Artists using technologies and systems are not niche—they have a rich history that is integral to the conversation.” Despite this history, Berninger notes that very few galleries show digital art, calling it a discipline that is “massively underserved”.
Most of the works Heft Gallery sells, including sculptures, paintings and ceramics, come with a digital token. If the collector is not interested in NFTs, the gallery can set up a custodial wallet for the token to exist in. “If they want to learn more, we are here to have that conversation and show them the rich Web3 community,” Berninger says, noting that the gallery’s collectors are a mix of Web3 and traditional art buyers.
In with the old and the new
Next year, Heft Gallery and Offline will be joined by another digital-meets-physical venture in Canyon, a new space for videos, digital-based art and durational art, also on the Lower East Side. The project was founded by the philanthropist and collector Robert Rosenkranz and will be helmed by Joe Thompson, the founding director of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass Moca). “Canyon will function as a museum (though we’ve deliberately avoided using that word too much), a performing arts and music venue and a social hub,” Thompson says.
While the launches of these endeavours reflect an increased interest in digital art, the medium’s history extends far beyond today’s hybrid art world and the speculative NFT boom of 2021 and 2022. Exemplified by the galleries Postmasters, which operated for nearly 40 years before closing in 2022, and Bitforms, a Manhattan mainstay for 25 years, dealers have been championing artists who embrace new technologies and create digital art for decades.
Offline’s first exhibition in July included Damon Zucconi’s 2024 work Jailbreak Courtesy of the artist and Offline
“I’m a fine art dealer who happens to be an expert in new media art, which includes NFTs, blockchain and Web3,” says Steven Sacks, the founder of Bitforms, which moved to the Lower East Side in 2014. “There’s been an incredible amount of change over the last 25 years and the history of digital art is crucial. If you’re going to collect in this territory, you need to know the history.”
Since its founding, Bitforms has worked with historical and contemporary artists who experiment with new media, many of whom create physical art not confined to screens. The gallery’s artists include pioneers in coding, like the octogenarian Manfred Mohr, and in AI, such as Refik Anadol. “My vision was always to understand how each generation deals with the latest technology and the tools available to them,” Sacks says. “A tool might seem rudimentary today, but it was innovative and experimental during its time.”
Sacks credits several factors for the rise in interest in digital art and new media, including the popularity of immersive experiences like the countless Vincent van Gogh projection exhibitions, which he says signal public appetite for new forms of engagement. He also cites an increase in institutional support, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s launch of an acquisition fund for digital art by women artists and the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s popular 2022-23 Anadol installation created with machine learning.
With such institutional support, it is likely digital art and tools like AI will continue to become part of the mainstream art world, even if galleries dedicated to new media remain the minority. As Bar-On Nesher puts it: “We live in a digital world and we can’t escape that.”
