The Gray Market Weekend Wrap #11

From ‘sentient perspective’ to Sylvester Stallone's French AI afterlife

Welcome back to The Gray Market’s weekend wrap, where I offer up a set of snack-sized recommendations for exhibitions, podcasts, articles and more, with thoughts on what makes each one matter to the current state of art and business.

In this edition, you’ll find:

• A work that detonates the most common misconception about what makes good immersive art

• An under-the-radar insight about the damage done by the LA wildfires

• A trio of articles covering AI slop’s covert corrosion of Modern art, US businesses’ foreboding offensive against DEI initiatives, and the TikTok ban’s counterintuitive relevance to e-commerce in the art trade

If any of that sounds interesting—or if you just want to support The Gray Market in its ongoing mission to explore where the art business is headed and why—you can subscribe or upgrade your membership using the button below. Paid subscribers will receive all future editions of the weekend wrap, access to the full Substack archive (free posts are paywalled after two months), and much more. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you.

One question I’m wondering about

With former politically neutral A-listers like Snoop Dogg, Carrie Underwood, and Nelly performing at various events related to Donald Trump’s inauguration, it’s clear the cultural sector is as vulnerable to authoritarian pandering in the 2020s as the corporate sector. So I have to ask: Which contemporary artists of note could you see volunteering to make Trump’s official presidential portrait in his second term?

Email your thoughts to tim@thegraymarket.xyz. I’ll include the most interesting one(s) in next weekend’s newsletter and comp the winners a one-month subscription.