An editor’s reflection on digital art, the generations finding their voice through technology, and our willingness to recognize creativity beyond the forms we already understand.
By Nicolò Di Stefano | Founder & Editor-in-Chief, QEditorial
There is a sentence that seems to end every conversation before it begins: “This is not art.”
It can be spoken in front of a computer-generated image, a virtual environment, or a work created through code. Sometimes it expresses a considered criticism. Other times, knowing that something began on a screen is enough for the judgment to be made.
Behind that sentence often lies a particular image of the artist: someone who works with physical materials, understands the resistance of a surface, and leaves a trace through the body. The painter before the canvas. The sculptor before the marble. A gesture we can observe and associate with skill.
I understand the power of that vision. Physical materials retain something of the time spent working with them: revisions, mistakes, moments of waiting. But I wonder what happens when this relationship becomes the standard by which we grant or deny someone else the right to be an artist.
Because on the other side of the screen, there may be a person searching for precisely the same thing: a form through which their voice can reach someone else.
The Present, Judged Through Yesterday’s Eyes
The history of art contains many conflicts between what an era recognizes and what it struggles to accept.
In 1874, the first Impressionist exhibition attracted approximately 3,500 visitors, while the official Salon drew half a million. Sales were limited. The critic Louis Leroy mocked works he considered unfinished. Today, the National Gallery of Art recounts that distance between their initial reception and their subsequent recognition.
The comparison requires care. It does not mean every contested artistic language will produce masterpieces, or that every criticism reveals a failure to understand. It means that institutions, audiences, and taste have histories of their own. Their criteria change.
When we look at an established masterpiece, we also encounter decades of interpretation, exhibitions, scholarship, and recognition. Its legitimacy precedes us. With an emerging language, we must take responsibility for looking without that reassurance.
Perhaps some resistance begins precisely here: in the uncertainty of forming a judgment that no one has yet made safe for us.
Growing Up Within a Different Landscape
For an artist raised among screens, video games, animation, and online communities, the digital world can be as familiar as a street, a home, or a landscape.
It may be where they formed friendships, explored their identity, and encountered images that changed them. It may be where they discovered a way to express something that remained shapeless elsewhere.
An avatar can become a reflection on the body. A virtual environment can communicate isolation. Animation can give anxiety a rhythm. Code can organize an experience that viewers enter and alter through their participation.
These expressive possibilities deserve to be considered through individual works. Dismissing them because of the tools involved means stopping the conversation before discovering whether there is a voice worth hearing.
Nor does this divide fall neatly between young and old. There are young painters deeply committed to canvas and digital pioneers who have worked for decades. The V&A traces British digital artistic practices back to the 1960s, including collaborations between artists and scientific laboratories.
The conflict also concerns our habits of looking: what we have learned to recognize as work, sensitivity, and presence.
The Work We Do Not Know How to See
Before a painting, we can look for brushstrokes. Before a digital work, part of the process may be less immediately visible.
We do not necessarily see the abandoned versions, the hours of modeling, the decisions about movement, or the construction of an interaction. The result may appear seamless, almost inevitable. That apparent ease can encourage the assumption that it was easy to make.
Here, too, balance matters. The amount of labor does not, by itself, determine artistic value. A technically complex work may have little to say; a simple gesture may open an important line of thought.
But our inability to recognize a skill does not justify assuming it is absent.
Critical attention should move closer to the process. What decisions were made? What relationship exists between the form and the artist’s intention? Why does this particular work require this particular medium?
These questions ask more of us than a simple refusal.
Recognition Has Already Begun
While part of the conversation continues to debate whether digital work belongs within art, some institutions have been engaging with it for years.
In 2001, the Whitney Museum launched artport, an online space dedicated to commissions of Internet art and new media art. Here, the network becomes a place for which an artwork is conceived, offering distinctive possibilities for participation and experience.
Collecting offers another indication. According to the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025, 51% of the 3,100 high-net-worth collectors surveyed had purchased a digital artwork in 2024 or 2025. Within that sample, Gen Z showed the highest participation in purchases of digital art and film and video art.
Purchases do not certify artistic value. Younger collectors do not automatically represent the choices of younger artists. These findings do, however, document a tangible openness: audiences are building relationships with works that others continue to regard as peripheral.
Recognition remains uneven. It can advance within a museum, encounter resistance in a gallery, and feel entirely natural within an online community.
Artificial Intelligence Makes the Conversation More Difficult
Within this landscape, AI introduces further questions. A digital drawing, an animation, and a programmed artwork should be distinguished from the use of a generative system. These processes involve different relationships between intention, execution, and outcome.
The objections also deserve attention. A study published in 2024, surveying 459 artists, identified concerns about transparency around training materials, rights, and the consequences of generative AI for artistic work. Reducing these concerns to a fear of change would weaken the conversation.
We can defend the legitimacy of digital art while asking for responsibility in the use of artificial intelligence.
We can also distinguish between two questions: what human experience is being expressed through these tools? And could an artificial intelligence one day possess an experience of its own?
The second remains an open hypothesis. To address the first, we already have real people before us.
Before We Ask a Machine Whether It Feels
An artist may paint because they love someone. They may sculpt while confronting fear. They may build a digital world to approach a part of themselves they cannot yet name.
Feeling does not become less significant when it passes through an unfamiliar tool. Our task is to consider whether, and how, it takes shape within the work.
The possibility of a future artificial intelligence capable of feeling remains a profound subject for reflection. But today, it brings me to a more immediate question: how willing are we to recognize human sensitivity when it chooses a language different from our own?
We could wait for a museum to welcome these artists, for the market to desire their work, or for time to make their images familiar. Or we could begin looking now, retaining the right to criticize while accepting the responsibility to understand.
The art we know has reached us partly through people who changed the conditions under which art could be recognized.
Before a screen today, someone may be searching for their voice.
Before deciding that they are not an artist, I would like to hear what they are trying to tell us.
Editor’s Note | Making Room for What Comes Next
I see digital art as a field that will continue to develop, deepen, and find its place within our cultural life. Its possibilities will evolve with the people who explore it, bringing their experiences, contradictions, and emotional lives into the work.
My appreciation for painting, sculpture, and physical craftsmanship makes me curious about what other tools can reveal. I can be moved by the surface of a canvas and remain equally open to an experience that unfolds through a screen.
For generations growing up within digital culture, these spaces can hold genuine memories and relationships. It seems natural to me that they would also become places of artistic expression.
I believe digital art will find a more established place in exhibitions, collections, and the way we understand creativity. That place should leave room for experimentation, thoughtful criticism, and the gradual development of individual voices.
At QEditorial, I want to approach that evolution with attention. We have an opportunity to listen while these languages are still taking shape, before recognition makes them comfortable.
Perhaps the first space we need to offer digital art is within our own willingness to look.
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