The art gallery facing the digital age: Adapting without betraying itself
In March 2020, David Zwirner launched his Online Viewing Rooms from a deserted meeting room in his Manhattan space. Within forty-eight hours, the platform recorded more unique visitors than all his physical spaces combined had welcomed in a month. This is not a crisis anecdote — it is the exposure of a tension the gallery world had been putting off for a decade: digital is no longer an auxiliary channel. It has become a fully-fledged exhibition space in its own right, with its own codes, its own economies, and its own threats.
By Artedusa
••10 min read01From the Paris Salon to the screen: a long history of disruptions
The commercial gallery as we know it is itself the product of a disruption. When Paul Durand-Ruel began exhibiting Monet and Renoir in his Parisian rooms in the 1870s, he broke radically with the model of the official Salon — jury, academic hierarchy, prescribed formats. He invented something new: the gallery as mediation between a living artist and a private collector, with a gallerist as arbiter of taste and the market.
A century later, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler did the same for Cubism. Leo Castelli in New York in the 1960s, Ileana Sonnabend in Paris, Jean Fournier with lyrical abstraction — each had to reinvent the model for disseminating contemporary art in the face of a shifting cultural context.
Digital is therefore not an unprecedented rupture in a linear history. It is the latest iteration of a series of reinventions that each era has imposed on galleries. What changes, however, is the speed. Durand-Ruel had twenty years to convince the market. Today's galleries had eighteen months of pandemic.
02The shock of 2020 and what it truly revealed
The Art Basel/UBS 2021 report documents a 22% drop in the art market in 2020, to 50.1 billion dollars. But this overall figure conceals a structural bifurcation: online sales, meanwhile, grew by 60% to reach 12.4 billion dollars — nearly a quarter of the global market, compared with 9% the previous year.
What is striking is not the growth itself. It is that the galleries that held up best were not necessarily the largest, but those that had already begun building a coherent digital presence before the crisis. Pace Gallery, which had launched its online viewing space back in 2017, activated an already well-tested infrastructure within days. Hauser & Wirth, whose website had been built for several years around a strong editorial model — essays, interviews, archives — found its online audience doubling in a matter of weeks.
By contrast, many mid-sized galleries — those that form the living tissue of the contemporary art market, structures representing ten to twenty artists without international reach — found themselves with an Instagram account and no strategy, and a website last redesigned in 2014. The conclusion was stark: the digital world does not forgive delay.
03The real economics of digital tools for a gallery
It is worth distinguishing what digital actually makes possible from what it promises. The Online Viewing Rooms launched by Art Basel in 2020 generated considerable enthusiasm, followed by measurable disillusionment: according to a survey conducted by The Art Newspaper among participating galleries, fewer than 30% felt the tool had generated significant sales in its first year. The format — a grid of images on a white background, technical sheets, a contact form — reproduces the logic of a catalogue without recreating its experience.
What works better is subtle hybridisation. The Berlin gallery König Galerie transformed its Saint-Agnes church nave into a filmed space of near-cinematic quality, with videos circulating on YouTube and Instagram at a production standard that serves the gallery's reputation as much as the works themselves. Kamel Mennour in Paris has invested in high-definition virtual tours that allow a collector in Hong Kong or Dubai to assess a sculpture from every angle before making the trip or placing an order. These are not substitutes for the physical experience — they are tools for qualifying potential buyers.
The Hiscox Online Art Trade Report 2023 notes that 72% of online art buyers are under 40, and that this segment spends on average three times more per online transaction than in a physical gallery for works under 50,000 euros. These figures shape strategies: digital is not there to sell works at 500,000 euros — it is there to capture and build loyalty among a generation of collectors who do not yet have the means for that price range, but will.
04NFTs, blockchain and the question of aura
In March 2021, Christie's sold Beeple's Everydays: The First 5000 Days for 69.3 million dollars. The sale was entirely digital, the lot a JPEG file accompanied by a blockchain certificate. The traditional art world watched with a mixture of scepticism and unease.
Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), postulated that reproduction destroys the aura of the original — that unique presence, that hic et nunc which only the physical object possesses. The paradox of NFTs is that they attempt to artificially recreate this aura in an environment where reproduction is infinite. The non-fungible token does not guarantee the uniqueness of the file — anyone can download Beeple's JPEG — but it certifies the uniqueness of a transaction on a decentralised ledger.
For galleries, the question is not philosophical — it is commercial. Pace Gallery launched Pace Verso, its NFT platform, in 2021, with editions by artists from its roster, having long represented artists working with digital media. Galerie Perrotin collaborated with artists such as JR on digital editions. These initiatives met with mixed fortunes: the NFT market, after its 2021-2022 peak, contracted by more than 90% in value according to DappRadar data. What remains is the infrastructure — blockchain as a tool for traceability and provenance certification, independent of speculation.
05What digital cannot reproduce — and why that is a resource
There is an experience that neither 8K resolution nor a virtual reality headset can replicate: standing before a two-metre Cy Twombly canvas, sensing the grain of the paint, perceiving the space the work creates around itself. Claire Bishop, in her essay Digital Divide published in Artforum in 2012, posed the question with disarming frankness: why was the contemporary art world, which claimed to care about presence, the body, and relation, investing so little in the specificities of physical experience when faced with the temptation of the all-digital?
That observation, far from being outdated, has become strategic. The galleries that best withstand digital pressure are those that have been able to articulate precisely what their physical space offers that the screen cannot. Thaddaeus Ropac, with his spaces in Pantin, Salzburg and Mayfair, has spent thirty years building an architectural experience — the quality of light in the former Pantin factory, the generous volumes that can accommodate monumental installations by Anselm Kiefer or Georg Baselitz — which is itself an argument for differentiation.
Galerie Marian Goodman in Paris, on the rue du Temple, has no particularly aggressive social media presence. Its website is sober, almost austere. And yet it represents some of the most significant artists of the moment. Its model rests on trust accumulated over forty years, on a network of institutional and private collectors that has no need of Instagram to be activated. This is a useful reminder: digital is a tool for development, not a substitute for reputation.
06The hybrid model: neither capitulation nor resistance
The question is ultimately not whether galleries should go online — they are already there, whether they choose to be or not, if only because their artists are. The question is how to articulate physical presence and digital presence without one cannibalising the other.
The Frieze Viewing Rooms, launched as an emergency measure in 2020, were retained not as a replacement for the physical fair but as a pre-qualification tool: a collector who has spotted a work online arrives at the Frieze stand with a purchasing intention already formed. The conversion rate improves as a direct result.
Almine Rech, with her spaces in Paris, Brussels, London and New York, has made an interesting editorial choice on her networks: rather than posting images of works for sale, she documents ongoing exhibitions with a photographic and editorial quality that resembles cultural journalism more than commercial communication. The effect is indirect but measurable: exhibitions become events that are commented on, shared, cited — which reinforces the gallery's symbolic value well beyond its geographical territory.
For mid-sized galleries — say, those working with fifteen to thirty artists, without international offices — the realistic strategy is not to replicate the investments of Pace or Hauser & Wirth. It is to identify one or two digital tools that genuinely match their model and their audience, and to do those well rather than doing everything badly. A monthly newsletter with real editorial content — a curator's text, an artist interview, an archival document — can build a relationship of trust with geographically dispersed collectors that even the finest art fair cannot sustain throughout the year.
07Preservation as an invisible challenge
There is one aspect of the digital transformation that galleries rarely discuss, because it generates little commercial enthusiasm: the conservation of natively digital works. Rhizome, a New York organisation affiliated with the New Museum, has been building an archive of net art since 1999 — works created on and for the web during the 1990s and 2000s — that is today partially at risk. The Flash plug-ins on which important works of that period ran ceased to be supported in December 2020. Works by artists such as Olia Lialina or JODI, which represent a historical moment in contemporary art, are no longer accessible without specialised technical emulation.
This is a lesson that galleries working with digital artists cannot afford to ignore. Acquiring a video work or an interactive installation in 2024 raises conservation questions that have no equivalent for a canvas on a stretcher: which file format? What technical documentation? What guarantee of legibility in twenty years' time? Verisart and other blockchain certification platforms offer paths toward traceability, but they do not resolve the problem of format obsolescence.
Galleries that work seriously with digital media — Bitforms in New York, Postmasters, or in France the structures that support artists such as Ernest Pignon-Ernest or Céleste Boursier-Mougenot in their digital dimensions — are developing conservation protocols in collaboration with the artists themselves. This is an invisible cost, rarely budgeted for, but one that conditions the long-term value of the works in question.
08What tomorrow's collectors actually want
The Hiscox 2023 report documents a qualitative shift in the expectations of online buyers: they are no longer simply looking for purchasing convenience, they are looking for context. Sixty-four percent of buyers surveyed said that the quality of the editorial content associated with a gallery directly influences their decision to buy. In concrete terms, this means: presentation texts that are not mere biographical notices, studio videos that show the working process, archives that give historical depth to a practice.
This expectation is not new — it corresponds to what the great galleries have always offered their best clients at private dinners or studio visits. What digital changes is the scale: content that was once reserved for a closed circle can now reach a collector in Seoul or São Paulo who has never set foot in the gallery's physical space.
The true promise of digital for a gallery is therefore not to replace the physical experience — it is to extend across time and space the relationship of trust and expertise that has always been at the heart of the profession. Durand-Ruel understood this when he opened branches in London and New York to promote his Impressionists: the gallery is not a place, it is a reputation in motion. Digital simply gives it a new speed of travel.
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