NETJETS US VOLUME 9 2019

artscape
diverges most from more traditional mediums.
Big-name artists like Marina Abramovic,
Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson and Antony
Gormley have recently produced works that
are freely accessible, not only at exhibitions but
also online and in apps, so that anyone with a
VR headset (or cardboard smartphone holder)
can view the works for themselves.
There is something almost revolutionary
about this, and the man leading the
democratic charge is Daniel Birnbaum, a
longtime radical who shocked the art world
last January when he left his eminent position
directing the Moderna Museet in Stockholm
to take the creative reins at London-based
Acute Art, where most of the boldface names
are producing their VR works. He has taken a
serious gamble on VR as an art form, but he
holds a remarkably long view of its potential:
“There are some who say you could view art
as a sort of service, not something you own
or keep for yourself, but something you have
access to—a little bit like Spotify or Netflix,”
he says with a smile. “On the other hand,
I’m not so sure. It’s a potential. There is
something wrong if VR art is only collected
like traditional art. There is potential for it to
be distributed much more widely than that,
so you don’t have to go to the Frieze Art Fair
or to a big museum in Paris. You could be in a
little suburb of Zagreb and see the exact same
things. There is a sort of quasi-utopian aspect
of this—that it could be everywhere—but I
think it will take a while.”
Birnbaum notes that some artists have
shied away from the medium, not wanting to
isolate the viewers so much, but even among
those who have embraced it he sees a glimpse
of that utopian spirit: “The people who want
to try it are there because they are curious, not
because they want to grow their audiences or
make money.”
It’s unusual in our age to see so much talk
about art without foregrounding finance,
which is why VR is so confounding—it is
both democratic and cutting-edge, a pairing
that has become exceptionally rare.
But there is one place where this pairing
is perfectly at home: Museums, which often
have the same twin values. Even the Louvre,
staid as it is, will offer the Mona Lisa VR
experience to people not able to come to Paris
during the exhibition on Viveport, the digital
subscription service from HTC, the firm that
makes the Vive headset.
“Allowing visitors who may not be able
to visit the exhibition in person to access
this remarkable masterpiece by Leonardo
da Vinci through our home version will give
unprecedented access to da Vinci’s most
celebrated painting,” says Victoria Chang,
Director of Vive Arts at HTC.
Chang’s pride in the democratization of
the world’s most valuable painting is a far
cry from the price-centric discussions of that
other Leonardo masterwork, the Salvator
Mundi, which sold for $450.3m in 2017. It
might well be that in a few decades we will
look back and see that VR’s biggest effect on
the art world will not have been as a medium
for artists, but as a means for making our
artistic masterpieces more accessible to
viewers across the globe.
A starry sky in Olafur
Eliasson’s Rainbow, 2017
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