Messy Business: No Outside

On Tuesday next week, the 61st Venice Biennale will open its doors to press and professionals. The main exhibition, In Minor Keys, is notably free of any digital anxiety, or indeed, any artists connected to anything digital. In the national pavilions, however, this is reversed. In the Greek Pavilion, Andreas Angelidakis, whose work interrogates problems of identity and cultural memory in the context of the internet, will stage a Platonic cave reimagined as an escape room – shadows in the age of Trump. Things to Come, an exhibition by Maja Malou Lyse, transforms the Danish Pavilion into a speculative environment in which science, sexuality and image culture collide.

At the centre is a three-channel film, made together with DIS, shot partly in a real sperm bank and partly in a special effects studio. Structured as a musical, it follows a group of porn performers in a future marked by fertility crisis and technological uncertainty. “The exhibition moves between the clinical world of fertility technology and the seductive logic of mass media," says Lyse. “It is becoming harder and harder to say with certainty whether an image is real or not. That instability has made us more aware of how fragile the image's relationship to truth has always been. In the pavilion, all the images are real. We wanted to insist on the presence of bodies – their performances, their physicality, their importance.” 

The works carry the DNA of the post-internet era: image consciousness, networked thinking, the porous boundary between the digital and the physical.  In Zurich, art students flock to lectures by internet performance artist Molly Soda, and cite the post-internet as a tool to decode image cultures today. Artist Katja Novitskova, author of the Post Internet Survival Guide (2010) notes: ‘It was about the way of seeing the world after the internet rather than an art world genre. I think all art is now “post internet art” to some degree.’ And this takes on many forms: a work may incorporate digital elements, video, installation and so on. 

Maja Malou Lyse, Antibodies, 2022 (film still) © Maja Malou Lyse

Adds gallerist Amadeo Kraupa Tuskany, of Berlin’s Kraupa Tuskany Zeidler gallery: “There was this extreme cross-border networking of these artists, who were in constant exchange in terms of content, but also aesthetically, always testing each other’s aesthetics. The playing back of work on the internet, and then from peers, to get this feedback.” Lyse adds a counterpoint: "Maybe it feels like a slightly different conversation to me. I was born in 1993, so I'm part of a younger millennial generation that doesn't really know an online world that feels raw or free. I grew up with tabloids, television, advertising, paparazzi culture, and early social media – I've looked at that way more than I've looked at art. In many ways, those visual languages feel more intimate and fluent to me than art history does." Daniel Wichelhaus, CEO of Berlin’s Société gallery describes the shift more simply: “When new technologies emerge and become part of everyday reality, they also become part of the handset for artists to explore things.”

Neither Wichelhaus nor Kraupa-Tuskany set out to represent a digital generation; the internet was simply the condition within which their artists were living. That the result came to be labelled post internet is, for both, something that happened to the artists rather than something they chose. “What distinguishes post-internet art is that it was not digital,” says Kraupa-Tuskany. “It’s just another platform.”

But why this retrieval of the semiotics of digital images? Kraupa-Tuskany locates the phenomenon less in nostalgia than in a generational turn in institutional power. "Curators who grew up with this generation and come from this generation themselves are now the directors of the art institutions," he says, "and who perhaps also realise themselves in the dream of doing a big exhibition with one of the artists." And where the museum leads, the market follows. It’s for that reason that the adage ‘See it in Venice; buy it in Basel’ was coined. Wichelhaus observes the same logic that drives a generation of curators operating at a collector level: the people who were twenty-five when these artists started out are now forty, with the means and the desire to own the cultural production of their own generation in a very classic way." 

The data reflects a market in genuine flux. According to the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025, 51 percent of the high-net-worth collectors surveyed bought a digital artwork in 2024 or the first half of 2025, representing the biggest jump of any medium. It is third in spending share at 14% of fine-art expenditure, nearly on par with sculpture. Holdings within collections swung sharply: digital art rebounded to 13 percent of what High Net Worth Individuals own, up from just 3% in 2024, when the NFT collapse had cratered the figure.

Only 11 percent of dealers surveyed sold any digital, film, or video art in 2025 – meaning the majority of galleries surveyed still don't transact in these mediums. Among those that did sell at least some, the share of their total sales by value was 10 percent, up from 7 percent in 2024.

Collector appetite for digital art is clearly recovering and broadening, but gallery infrastructure hasn't followed - only one in nine dealers engage with it. Of course digital art doesn’t necessarily concern itself with the semiotics of the digital image, but the trend towards purchasing works that reflect our hypercontemporary moment is clear. 

Wichelhaus is sceptical of aggregate statistics but sees the shift in the collector base clearly. Of Petra Cortright’s early YouTube works – priced at one dollar per click – he notes that few people bought them as art at the time: “It only came, as it often is, perhaps with a ten-year delay – and in retrospect it obviously seemed like art.” Kraupa-Tuskany identifies a newer pipeline: NFT-era collectors entering the traditional market, drawn by a familiarity with digital aesthetics. But he adds a counterintuitive footnote – these buyers often end up collecting paintings. “It’s often much more classic than you think,” he says. “Visually strong, but not necessarily post internet.”

Behind the scenes of Maja Malou Lyse, Things to Come. Photo: by Zoe Chait © Zoe Chait and Maja Malou Lyse

The irony is of course is that the digital art of today exists in an environment where scrutiny of images and the attendant digital literacy is more important than ever before: deepfakes created via ever more powerful AI models endanger democracies, are used to create nonconsensual pornography, and circulate, unmitigated, through Tiktok, X, and other social platforms. “There's a lot of things in Post Internet Survival Guide that make complete sense today", says Novitskova. “The world is now terminally online. Geopolitical collapse driven by technology. Google Brain. Middle Eastern conflicts.”  

Lyse grounds her pavilion in a lineage of image theory that runs deeper than platform aesthetics. Images, she argues, have always been active forces rather than passive surfaces: shaping belief, behaviour and desire long before the internet made that power visible. She invokes Harun Farocki's concept of the operational image, images made by machines for machines, capable of guiding weapons and structuring warfare from within technological systems, to suggest that what looks like a provocation about pornography and sperm motility is in fact a much older argument: that images do not represent reality so much as participate in it.

Novitskova’s practice has always insisted on exactly this: “It’s not that there’s an image of a beautiful animal, it’s about the animal. It’s also about the image itself, and the fact that the image is this artificial form, it’s a digital file. I’m always trying to do a full stack analysis of this: Who made it, with what equipment and why, is there an economy for that?” Adds Lyse: "We talk about the Venice Biennale as one of the most visited exhibitions in the world, but the traffic a platform like Pornhub receives in minutes can rival what the Biennale accumulates over months. That says something about where attention really lives, and which image economies we still pretend are marginal." Farocki's operational images were made to act on the world, not to be looked at. What Lyse, Novitskova and a generation of artists have understood -  and what the market is slowly, belatedly, learning -  is that this is no longer a condition unique to machines. It describes every image, everywhere, now.

Jeni Fulton is an editor and writer based in Zürich.