Digital art at Sotheby’s? The auction house is better known for selling canvases by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat for $100 million-plus than for showing what many collectors still regard as ephemera.
Yet the Sotheby’s S2 gallery in New York, normally used for exhibitions of contemporary art, is currently the site of a show featuring mostly young artists who rely on digital technology and who are not exactly household names. Surprisingly, most of the works on view take physical form. More significant, they also betray a broad generational anxiety about the technological future and the role of humans in it.