Art galleries facing the digital shift: adapting without losing your soul

In March 2021, when Christie's sold Everydays: The First 5000 Days by Beeple for $69.3 million — a purely digital work, a JPEG file tokenized on blockchain — the gallery world was brutally confronted with a question it had been deferring for years: what exactly are you selling when you sell art? A sensory experience? An object? A certificate of prestige? The Beeple sale was not merely a record; it was a revealing moment. The digital art market had tipped into the mainstream, whether the establishment liked it or not.

01When the historical gallery model begins to waver

To understand the pressure digital exerts today, we must return to the model that dominated for half a century. The contemporary art gallery as it structured itself in the 1970s rests on a simple triptych: a carefully neutralized physical space (the famous "white cube" theorized by Brian O'Doherty in Inside the White Cube, 1976), an exclusive relationship between gallery and artist, and an opaque sales circuit built on trust and the address book. This model produced empires. Think of Larry Gagosian, who opened his first gallery in Los Angeles in 1980 with 60 square meters and now directs 19 spaces across three continents. Think of Emmanuel Perrotin, who started from an apartment in the 11th arrondissement in 1990 to build a network of 13 galleries from New York to Seoul.

This model assumed a scarcity of access. You came to see art because there was no other way to see it. The internet demolished that premise in twenty years. specialist online platforms now references more than one million works from 4,000 galleries in 100 countries. market data platforms offers sales data going back to the 1980s. The Hiscox Online Art Trade 2023 report estimated the online art market at $10.8 billion in 2022 — down from the pandemic peak but structurally established. The physical gallery is no longer the only entry point into the market. Sometimes, it is no longer even the primary one.

02The pandemic as a brutal accelerator

The real operational turning point was not Beeple. It was March 2020. Within days, hundreds of galleries worldwide found themselves shuttered, with fixed costs — rent, salaries, insurance — continuing to run. The response was immediate and sometimes clumsy: "online viewing rooms" (OVRs) hastily assembled on platforms like Artlogic or proprietary solutions.

Pace Gallery had anticipated the move, having launched its first OVRs as early as 2017 in partnership with the blockchain registry Artory for artwork traceability. In 2020, they were ready. David Zwirner had launched Platform in 2020, a kind of digital magazine integrating direct sales for smaller galleries — a gesture both commercial and ecumenical, acknowledging that the crisis affected the entire ecosystem. Art Basel, for its part, transformed its cancelled fairs into OVRs that generated significant sales, though figures remained below physical editions.

The Art Basel/UBS 2021 report documented the sector's resilience: online sales for surveyed galleries had represented 37% of total revenue in 2020, compared to 10% in 2019. A tripling in one year. But the same report highlighted a crucial nuance: the majority of these online sales involved works under $50,000. The high-value segment remained resistant to dematerialization. Collectors who buy at six or seven figures continued — and continue — to demand seeing the work in flesh and pigment.

03What digital cannot transmit — and why that is strategic

There is an experience that the best 3D rendering algorithms cannot reproduce: standing before a Mark Rothko canvas in a gallery at MoMA or the Tate Modern. Rothko's color fields, their optical vibration, their capacity to alter the perception of surrounding space — all of this depends on physical presence, real scale, light reflecting differently off the painted surface at different times of day. Photographing a Rothko captures the memory, not the experience.

This limitation is not an aesthetic anecdote; it is a first-order commercial argument. Galleries that understood this have transformed the irreducibility of the physical into a competitive advantage. Hauser & Wirth, for example, has developed spaces that resemble cultural institutions more than sales venues — their Bruton space in Somerset, opened in 2014 in a former farmhouse with a garden, restaurant, and residency program, generates an experience that no digital interface can simulate. Digital serves them to prepare the visit, extend the experience afterward, and reach geographically distant audiences — but never to replace it.

Kamel Mennour, in Paris, has adopted a similar logic: a polished digital presence on Instagram and through OVRs, but openings that remain physical events with a high social coefficient, irreplaceable for collectors who also buy a sense of belonging to a milieu. Digital democratizes visual access; the physical sells the feeling of belonging.

04NFTs: the euphoria, the collapse, and what remains

The story of NFTs in the art world could be told as a parable of speculation. Between 2020 and early 2022, the market exploded: according to DappRadar, total NFT sales volume reached nearly $25 billion in 2021. Artists like Pak or XCOPY, virtually unknown to the general public, became reference points of a new market. Damien Hirst launched The Currency in 2021, a project in which 10,000 works on paper existed in dual form — physical version and NFT version — with the buyer having to choose which to keep while the other was destroyed. A perfectly calibrated staging around the question of value.

Then came the crash. In autumn 2022, compounded by the cryptocurrency collapse and the implosion of FTX, the NFT market lost between 90 and 97% of its volume across platforms. OpenSea laid off 20% of its staff. Collectors who had paid tens of thousands of dollars for JPEGs found themselves holding near-illiquid assets.

What remains, once the foam is cleared, is more interesting than the speculative peak. Blockchain technology offers real tools for art: provenance traceability, resale rights management, and artwork authentication. Platforms like Verisart or Artory now allow galleries to issue unforgeable certificates of authenticity linked to physical works. The potential is not in speculation — it is in infrastructure.

05Three adaptation models and their internal tensions

Observation of the market since 2020 reveals three distinct stances toward digitalization, each with its coherences and contradictions.

The first is full integration, embodied by galleries like Pace or the Luma Foundation, which have invested heavily in immersive technologies — VR, AR, digital installations — and treat digital as a medium in its own right. The tension here is budgetary: these investments are costly and their return on investment remains difficult to measure precisely.

The second is minimal adaptation, adopted by many mid-size galleries that opened polished Instagram accounts, integrated a management system like ArtBinder for their client databases, and offered OVRs during fairs — without reinventing their model. This is a pragmatic position, but one that risks missing the generational shift among collectors.

The third is deliberate refusal, carried by a few galleries that make the absence of digital a mark of distinction. No online sales, no OVRs, openings by invitation only. This stance works for structures with a reputation and a collector base loyal enough to sustain it. It is, however, inaccessible to emerging galleries that need visibility to build their identity.

06The question of curation in the algorithmic age

There is a specific risk that few players name clearly: the delegation of curation to algorithms. specialist online platforms uses its "Art Genome Project," a classification system with over 1,000 descriptive genes, to generate personalized recommendations. Christie's and Sotheby's analyze bidding behavior through machine learning to refine their strategies. These are powerful tools — but they optimize based on what has already been purchased, mechanically creating confirmation biases.

The historical role of the gallerist is precisely the opposite: introducing the collector to what they do not yet know, provoking the productive discomfort of discovery, supporting artists whose value is not yet recognized. This is what Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, calls "the duty of the unexpected." An algorithm optimizes; a gallerist bets.

The real question you should ask, if you run a gallery, is not "how can I use digital better?" but "what can digital not do in my place?" The answer outlines your irreducible competitive advantage.

07Rhizome and the fragile memory of digital art

An angle often overlooked in this debate is conservation. Digital art born in the 1990s is dying — not because it lacks value, but because technical formats evolve faster than archiving capabilities. Rhizome, the New York organization founded in 1996 and affiliated with the New Museum, has assembled an "ArtBase" of more than 2,000 works of net art. Its "Webrecorder" project develops emulation tools that allow works designed for obsolete browsers to run again.

My Boyfriend Came Back from the War by Olia Lialina, a 1996 net art piece built in pure HTML, has been "reactivated" multiple times for modern browsers — each version raising questions about the authenticity of the experience. This is the paradox of digital restoration: unlike a painting, where the original material can be preserved, a work in code is inseparable from its technical execution environment. The first NFT in history, Quantum by Kevin McCoy, minted in 2014 on the Namecoin blockchain, was literally "lost" for years before being rediscovered in 2021.

These conservation questions are already market questions. A collector who buys a video installation or an NFT needs to know how that work will be accessible in twenty years. Galleries that anticipate this problem — by offering acquisition contracts specifying technical migration rights, by partnering with archiving services like Arweave — build a differential trust relationship with their clients.

08What "adapting without losing your soul" concretely means

The phrase is elegant, but it demands a prior decision: identifying what constitutes the soul of a gallery, what cannot be sacrificed without the institution losing its reason for being. For some galleries, it is an exclusive and enduring relationship with their artists. For others, it is a coherent thematic program over the long term. For still others, it is welcoming a specific audience — regional, community-based, young.

Digital does not betray a gallery. What betrays it is adopting digital tools to resemble everyone else rather than to deepen what it already is. Thaddaeus Ropac opened his first Parisian space in Pantin in 1990, in an industrial zone that had nothing obvious about it for contemporary art — a strong identity choice. His digital presence today amplifies that singularity rather than dissolving it.

The "phygital" gallery model — a convenient but reductive term — only makes sense if the digital and the physical serve the same vision. Technology is a means. The vision is what makes a gallery worth existing, online or offline.