Whitney acquires artworks from artists Gretchen Andrew and Michael Mandiberg

Congratulations to both artists!

These acquisitions are the sole works to enter the permanent collection of the Whitney’s Digital Art department in this half of the year. A deep thanks to the Whitney Digital Art team, Acquisition Committee, and the Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney, Christiane Paul.

It's been an honor to show these special bodies of work over the past year in major fair presentations at Untitled Miami and Paris Photo, as well as at our NYC gallery.

The two series interrogate the trend towards homogenizing the way people are portrayed in an era of global digital media consumption, each engaging issues around artificial intelligence without making its.

See more about both series below, and inquire by email or DM about special opportunities to collect from these artists.

Taking Stock by Michael Mandiberg

For Taking Stock, Michael Mandiberg collected and analyzed 130 million stock photographs to produce a series of photographs and videos that surface the ideologies haunting these ubiquitous images.

Stock photos need to be more carefully considered because AI is learning from them. These generic photos saturate our visual landscape – instructing us through public service announcements, cajoling us to buy buy buy, and always attempting to pretend that gender is a stable binary. Unlike the way countless artists and scholars have dissected the influence of cinematic, fashion, advertising, and celebrity images, no decent photo theorist or historian will go anywhere near these photos. They smell too strongly of commerce and clichés. All studium, no punctum. This alone makes them worth considering, and now AI is analyzing these stock photographs as if they are factual evidence of what we look like – yet these images are far from neutral.

It’s important to emphasize that these images and videos are not created with Generative AI. Rather they are constructed from the data used to train these generators, revealing the latent images already present in that dataset. Learn more about this process and see the artworks here:

Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty by Gretchen Andrew

In Gretchen Andrew’s Facetune Portraits, custom robotics scribe the popular AI-driven beauty filters of social media into oil paintings derived from images of quintessential beauty.. Normally, on TikTok and via Zoom’s “touch up” feature, these visual modifications occur seamlessly and invisibly. By making this process visible, Facetune Portraits reveals the messy co-existence we have with our digital selves.

These works outwardly portray the absurd, and too-real scars of the hidden ‘perfections’ that lurk behind so many of the images we experience – revealing our desire not just to be beautiful, but to be like everyone else: accepted as much by the algorithms as by our peers. See each work from the series here:

The works acquired by the Whitney represent the level of rigor, research, meaning, and beauty that our program pursues – and these criteria have led to our next show, opening this week, with special works from New York artist Luke Shannon:

Opening This Week:
Replacement Character by Luke Shannon

Please join us this Wed, Oct 8, from 6-9pm for the opening of our next exhibition, Replacement Character by Luke Shannon.

Anchored by its plotter-scanner installation, a custom machine designed and built by the artist, the series presents works that are both precise and intimate, holding the body at scale, yet fractured at the seams. Shannon’s engagement with the machine becomes a new form of self-portraiture: durational, ephemeral, and mirroring the artist’s own presence. RSVP in the link below. All are welcome!