Art Basel Working to catch up Changing behavior and tastes of a new generation of collectors– who will Shaping the future of the industrial world—and an audience increasingly drawn to technology and digital assets. Many of these collectors will travel to Miami for the city’s busy art week thinking that they are unlikely to encounter offerings that reflect their interests at the mega fair. but Art Basel Miami Beach This year will look a little different with the launch of Zero 10, which puts digital art front and center on the main floor of the fair. “Not above, not offsite. It will be central to the Miami Beach Fair experience and its 100,000 attendees and 10,000 onsite collectors,” Digital Art Strategist Eli SheinmanWho is curating the section, declared in X.
Presented with support from OpenSea, Zero 10—which is debuting in Miami but will roll out at other Art Basel fairs next year—connects the expanding digital art community with the established framework of the international art market. Borrowing its name from “0,10” (Kazir MalevichFrom the groundbreaking 1915 exhibition in Petrograd that reimagined the possibilities of artistic language), Zero 10 is Art Basel’s attempt to redefine how digital art can be experienced, understood and acquired in today’s art market.
The inaugural Zero 10 presentation will feature 12 leading galleries and studios long active in the digital space, including AOTM, Art Blok, Asprey Studio, Beeple Studio, Bitform Gallery, Fellowship, Heft, Visualize Value, Nguyen Wahed, Onkaos, Pace Gallery and SOLOS. There will also be solo presentations Internationally acclaimed digital artist Lu YangUBS deals with loans from art collections.
The department was launched amid a major shift in collection practices. If the pandemic accelerated the digitalization of the art world, digital channels and artistic formats have since been increasingly integrated into “traditional” art systems. The 2025 Art Basel and UBS survey of global collections reveals that digital art has officially emerged as a key acquisition category, with online platforms—including social media and direct sales from artists—now mainstream avenues for engagement.
The mainstream of digital art
51 percent of high-net-worth collectors reported buying a digital artwork in 2024/25, making digital art the third-largest category of fine-art spending (about 14 percent), almost equal to sculpture, while painting remains dominant at 27 percent. Looking ahead, 23 percent of HNW collectors plan to expand their digital art holdings, up from 19 percent in the previous survey. The next generation of buyers is driving this growth, with Gen Z collectors representing 26 percent of respondents and a remarkable 63 percent of them reporting digital art purchases in 2024 or 2025.
Zero 10 builds on a series of recent Art Basel initiatives advancing the intersection of industry, technology and market infrastructure. These include the Digital Art Council, which brings together leading collectors, artists and institutional voices to guide Art Basel’s engagement with digital practice; the Digital Dialogue Program, a global conversation series exploring art and technology; and large-scale digital showcases throughout the fair—such as Bright Moments’ dream-0 by Humemin A curated presentation of digital works at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024 and within the Encounter Sector Art Basel Hong Kong 2025. Complementary projects—including the AI-powered Art Basel app and the expansion of the digital version of the Art Basel Shop—also reinforce the fair’s commitment to operating seamlessly across both physical and digital platforms.
Meanwhile, Museums are embracing digital art With new urgency, moving from isolated experiments to sustained institutional engagement. The Buffalo AKG Art Museum recently presented “Peer to Peer: Digital Art as Community,” one of the first US museum exhibitions entirely devoted to blockchain-based and generative practices, situating digital creation within a broader lineage of conceptual and participatory art. After the exhibition ended, the museum acquired tokenized versions of all sixteen works—making it the first major collection of NFTs acquired by an American art museum. The museum has also expanded its capacity for digital art in recent years, adding works by generative and NFT-native artists such as Casey Race, Sarah Mayohas And IX shell. Most recently, it announced the acquisition of three portfolios spanning the mid-1960s to the early 1980s and eight individual operations in the early computer industry.
The Toledo Museum of Art is another US institution at the forefront of this field, integrating digital and generative practices in both its collections and curatorial programming. led by Director and CEO Adam LevineThrough exhibitions such as the recent “Visual Language: The Art of Data”, the museum has demonstrated its awareness of the new generation of art experiences and evolving ways, and by exploring the intersections of code, design and perception, positions itself as a key voice in describing digital media and how digital media extend the forms of modern technology.
The Whitney Museum of American Art has expanded its online gallery to showcase born-digital commissions that exist natively on the web, opening up new questions of access, authorship, and preservation. At MoMA, which began with Rafik Anadolu’s immersive data installation in the museum’s atrium An ongoing program exploring the aesthetics and ethics of digital, algorithmic image making and artistic production has developed. On the West Coast, LACMA is among the most active institutions in the space, launching its Art + Technology Lab and partnering with artists and technologists to explore blockchain, AI and augmented reality, while actively creating a collection of NFTs and time-based digital works.
At the same time, a new generation of institutions devoted entirely to digital and immersive artworks is expanding rapidly worldwide. Anadol is poised to make history by opening the world’s first institution entirely dedicated to championing, promoting and exhibiting the creative synergy between art and AI, with places like the ARTE Museum founded by the Korean collective D’District and TeamLab’s growing network of experiential museums—from Abu Dhabi to Musumeburg to Museumburg. Maybe in the digital age. Combining large-scale projection, algorithmic animation and environmental design, they create multisensory spaces that blur the boundaries between art, technology and architecture. Their popularity among audiences reveals not only a growing appetite for technologically mediated experiences but also a broader cultural shift toward interactive forms of aesthetic engagement—signaling that digital art has moved from marginal to a defining expression of global visual culture.
