The vernissage is dead, long live the digital vernissage

01From varnish to pixel: a genealogy we forget too quickly

The word vernissage carries its own material history within it. At the Paris Salon, admitted artists were given a single day — the day of the vernissage — to apply a final coat of varnish to their canvases, adjusting colours to the light of the great rooms of the Louvre or the Palais de l'Industrie, before the public was admitted. This technical gesture, almost artisanal, was also a form of ultimate control over the work. Critics, collectors and peers moved between the easels and the stepladders, forming a provisional community around the still-fresh work.

This intimacy between making and showing gradually disappeared as the art market took shape. At Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's gallery on the rue Vignon, where he represented Picasso, Braque and Léger, the vernissage became a commercial device as much as a cultural rite. Leo Castelli, in New York during the 1960s, perfected the mechanics: a carefully vetted guest list, a thoroughly briefed press, a hanging conceived for the artificial light of evening openings. The vernissage ceased to be a moment of finishing and became a moment of launch — a market logic that has only intensified since.

This slide toward spectacle reached its apex with the international biennials. In Venice, the vernissage days preceding the official opening have become a parallel market where galleries, museums and foundations compete with VIP invitations, parties in palazzi and collectors' dinners. The work itself becomes almost secondary in this social ballet. It was precisely this ceremonial inflation that made the emergence of a digital alternative possible — and even desirable for some.

022020, the involuntary accelerator

The lockdown of March 2020 acted like a photographic developer: it did not invent the digital vernissage, it made visible what already existed in latent form. Hauser & Wirth, which had been exploring digital formats for several years, deployed within a matter of weeks a virtual reality viewing infrastructure based on Matterport technology, allowing visitors to wander through its spaces in Zürich, London or Los Angeles with millimetric precision. The results exceeded internal expectations: the gallery reported a significant increase in digital engagement and, above all, the acquisition of new collectors from geographies that had until then remained peripheral to it.

On the institutional side, the Louvre launched Louvre at Home and recorded more than ten million visits to its virtual tour of the Mona Lisa in the first month alone — a figure surpassing the number of people who see the painting physically in an entire year, under conditions of contemplation that are, of course, incomparably different. This statistic, as dizzying as it is, immediately raises a thorny question: what exactly are we looking at when we look at a screen showing a painting we cannot look at closely?

Pace Gallery, for its part, accelerated the rollout of Pace Verso, its digital exhibition space dedicated to works born for digital environments. This was no longer a gallery putting its exhibitions online — it was a gallery conceiving exhibitions for online, with artists whose practice is inseparable from the digital medium. The distinction matters enormously.

03The anatomy of a vernissage with no room

A successful digital vernissage obeys its own dramaturgy, quite different from its physical equivalent. The preparation phase typically begins several weeks in advance with fragmented content on Instagram — video teasers of the hanging, stories from the artist's studio, visual countdowns. Gagosian has become particularly skilled at this mechanics of anticipation, using its newsletter and social channels as a gradual decompression chamber before the event itself.

The vernissage proper takes the form of a livestream — on Instagram Live, Zoom or a proprietary platform — hosted by a curator, sometimes by the artist. Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery, has transformed his live conversations into a recognised format in their own right, capable of generating an international audience without a single plane ticket being purchased. Tate Modern developed its Artist Rooms series in hybrid format, combining pre-recorded interviews with live question-and-answer sessions where the chat feed becomes a kind of collective vernissage notebook.

What is missing, obviously, is what Walter Benjamin called the aura — that singular presence of the original in space and time. But other, more prosaic things are missing too: the chance conversation with a critic beside the bar, the physical brush against a painted surface, the way a sculpture alters the volume of a room as you draw near it. The digital vernissage is rich in information and poor in sensation. It is a feat of mediation, not of experience.

04When the NFT reinvents the notion of the premiere

March 2021. Christie's hammers down Everydays: The First 5000 Days by Beeple for 69.3 million dollars. The event is broadcast live, the auction counter visible in real time across the networks, debates igniting simultaneously on Twitter and in the Discord rooms of crypto collectors. It is the first wholly digital-native vernissage-auction to reach this scale at a traditional auction house — and it redefines what it means to "attend" an art event.

The platform SuperRare, launched in 2018, had already established a model of digital vernissages for the drops of artists such as XCOPY, whose glitched and dystopian works found in the blockchain environment a formal coherence with their themes. Foundation, more accessible, allowed less established artists to hold their own vernissages with live auctions, drawing communities of collectors who would never have crossed the threshold of a physical gallery.

The French artist Joanie Lemercier, who has worked for years on light projections in architectural spaces, nonetheless chose to publicly abandon her own NFT sale in 2021 after calculating that the associated transactions consumed the equivalent of her entire annual carbon footprint in a handful of minutes. This gesture — cancelling her digital vernissage in the name of the environment — is one of the rare instances in which criticism from within produced a genuine effect on the sector's discourse.

05What the algorithm chooses in place of the curator

One of the blind spots in the debate around the digital vernissage concerns the role of algorithmic curation. When Amalia Ulman created Excellences & Perfections in 2014 — an Instagram performance in which she simulated for four months the life of a young woman in search of recognition — she used the mechanics of the algorithm itself as artistic material. Her vernissage does not exist: the exhibition is its own feed, consumed in real time without her followers knowing it was a work at all.

This extreme case illustrates a structural problem: on Instagram or TikTok, it is the algorithm that decides which works circulate, not on the basis of artistic quality but of their capacity to generate engagement. Accounts like @theartidote or @artbutmakeitfashion reach millions of people with short, visually striking formats — but they also construct an aesthetic hierarchy in which photographically spectacular art crushes conceptually demanding art. The paintings of Mark Bradford or the sculptures of Theaster Gates lose something essential in this format; the installations of Yayoi Kusama gain a virality that far exceeds their usual audience.

Hito Steyerl puts the question most directly in Duty-Free Art (2017): digital platforms do not democratise art, they transform it into data in service of an attention economy of which they are the only real beneficiaries. The digital vernissage does not escape this logic. Every Instagram live stream by a gallery feeds Meta's metrics; every click on a work in an Online Viewing Room is behavioural data captured and monetised well beyond the artistic transaction.

06The promise of democratisation, and its real limits

It would be unfair to dismiss the accessibility argument too quickly. A student of the arts in Dakar or Bogotá can today follow live conversations between Refik Anadol and the curator of ARTECHOUSE, download PDF catalogues from the Fondation Cartier, navigate the digital archives of the Centre Pompidou or Tate. This was not possible fifteen years ago, and it is not nothing.

The art market nonetheless remains deeply concentrated. The Art Basel/UBS report documents each year that first-tier galleries — Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, Pace — capture a disproportionate share of transactions, including online. Online Viewing Rooms have certainly broadened the potential client base geographically, but they have not fundamentally redistributed the balance of power between established galleries and emerging structures. A virtual visitor in Nairobi who grows excited about an eighty-thousand-dollar work on the Marian Goodman website is no less excluded by price than they were by geography.

The real democratisation may be happening elsewhere: on platforms like specialist online platforms, which offer works across a very wide range of prices, or in the Discord servers of emerging artists organising their own private vernissages for their communities — a form of return, paradoxically, to the intimacy of the nineteenth-century vernissage, stripped of its class elitism but not necessarily of its network logic.

07The phygital vernissage: neither nostalgia nor utopia

TeamLab, the Japanese collective founded in 2001 whose immersive installations have taken up permanent residence in Tokyo, Shanghai and Singapore, perhaps offers the most coherent model of what tomorrow's vernissage might look like. Their vernissages make no distinction between physical and digital presence: the works respond simultaneously to bodies in space and to interactions on mobile applications, creating an experience that only makes sense in that crossing. It is neither a physical vernissage to which a live stream has been added, nor a digital vernissage simulating presence — it is a third thing, still without a proper name.

Rhizome, the New York organisation dedicated to the preservation and creation of digital art, has spent years working on a question that few galleries have the courage to ask plainly: what remains of a digital vernissage when the links are dead, when the platform has closed, when the video format has become unreadable? Its ArtBase initiative has preserved pioneering works such as Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996), which without this archival labour would simply have vanished. The memory of the digital vernissage is structurally fragile — and that may be its most profound contradiction with the tradition it claims to carry forward.

The vernissage has always been a negotiation between art and the world around it — an interface, to use a vocabulary that the digital age has rendered commonplace. What changes today is the nature of that interface: less red velvet and champagne, more pixels and blockchain protocols. What remains essential does not change: it is always a matter of creating the conditions for an encounter between a work and those who might truly look at it.