It is a truth universally acknowledged that the best encounter with a work of art is a physical one. But it is also an irrefutable fact that international air travel and the shipping of art get top billing as our sector’s major pollutant.
So if the art world genuinely wants to get its environmental act together, then it urgently needs to reassess its choice to show and view an ever-increasing number of objects worldwide. Recently, it was announced that 2024 was the hottest year on record, for the first time passing the 1.5°C global warming threshold agreed by the UN in 2015, while the United Nations has confirmed that CO2 levels are now at their highest levels in at least two million years. So clearly something has to change—and fast.
Going virtual may be part of the solution. At the end of last year Vortic, the company which describes itself as offering “a virtual reality and digital exhibition ecosystem for galleries, institutions and collectors,” commissioned a sustainability report from the independent carbon analyst and climate action consultant Danny Chivers, aimed at quantifying the environmental benefits of showing work digitally.
“I set up Vortic in 2017 on the back of working at a big gallery and feeling that the way we were working—especially going to all those art fairs with all those millions of crates—was just not sustainable,” explains Vortic’s founder Oliver Miro. “I wanted Vortic technology to try and replicate that feeling of standing in front of a work of art but I also wanted to confirm the extent of which every shipment saved by a Vortic view was an ecological way of going forward.”
The results of the report (soon to be published in full on the Gallery Climate Coalition website) were compelling. Compared with an exhibition using international air freight and travel, a digital exhibition reduces carbon emissions by more than 90%, and if the participants already possess the necessary viewing equipment, these reductions can reach up to 96%. In the case of notoriously polluting art fairs, the differential between physical and virtual art fair booths is even more dramatic.
Installation view of Global Muses, a digital exhibition curated by Laura Day Webb
Courtesy of Vortic
Using a digital booth instead of travelling from London to Miami for an art fair can reduce emissions by up to 99.6%, which equates to around 278 times lower emissions than the physical equivalent. Even when considering journeys involving shorter distances, the difference between analogue and digital is also notable. According to this report, for a London gallery to substitute attending an art fair in Basel for a fully digital booth can offer emissions reductions of up to 98.7%.
What could happen in the short term?
Art fairs are not likely to go fully digital anytime soon, but these figures act as a potent signal of what a difference it could make if they move in that direction. As Chivers says, “these significant [potential] carbon savings don’t come as a huge surprise, but having these numbers available will hopefully give galleries and artists the confidence to consider more digital options as a way for their work to be seen beyond local audiences and collectors while burning a lot less fossil fuel.”
As the technology becomes evermore advanced, low-cost and accessible, and the 3D rendering of objects increasingly high quality, a more immediate and feasible solution is for galleries and collectors to adopt a hybrid approach that combines both physical and digital.
For example, a gallery could choose to ship smaller, lighter pieces to an art fair booth while allowing potential buyers to view virtual versions of more weighty, hefty (and expensive to transport) works on screen or via a headset. Or the gallery may just decide to have fewer works and staff on site, with more viewings and conversations taking place virtually.
Chivers’ study confirms that emissions can still be halved by adopting a hybrid model, whether in art fairs or gallery exhibitions—where a small number of physical works could be augmented by additional works available to view digitally. “It’s about incremental change, we’re not going to convince people to throw out the rulebook,” declares Miro. “We want our technology to complement what has already been set up and established in the art world.”
The permutations are infinitely tweakable, and some are already being adopted. A small number of collectors have substituted physically attending at an art fair for visiting via headset, and meetings with a gallerist for a virtual wander around a booth.
“The new Apple headset that came out last year is incredible—it’s such an experience using it to view an exhibition,” says Miro, adding that every time Victoria Miro Gallery mounts a show he “jump[s] on a headset with three or four collectors from around the world and walk[s] through the exhibition with them.”
Miro also reveals that a number of artists are now embracing this technology. “We did a big project with Doug Aitken where the works were conceived and digitally constructed, but not actually made,” he says. “So people could have the experience of standing in front of these works that have been conceived by the artist, and if they then decided to acquire that work, then the work was put into production. But until then it wasn’t taking up storage or being shipped around the world for viewings.”
Christie’s partnered with holographic communication company Proto to create a hologram of Edgar Degas’s Petite danseuse de quatorze ans Courtesy Christies
Elsewhere in the art world, virtual versions of works of art are also making an appearance. In 2022, the auction house Christie’s announced its partnership with the holographic communication company Proto, most famously to tour a high-end, life-sized hologram of Edgar Degas’s sculpture Petite Danseuse de quatorze ans (around 1880) to London, San Francisco and Hong Kong, in advance of the New York sale that year where it realised a record-breaking $41.6 million.
Some other galleries and organisations—including Vortic—also work with the organisation Dubbl, which uses complex 3D capture technology to make precise digital replicas of works of art that can be rotated and scrutinised from all angles, whether on a mobile device or using a headset.
What are some of the complications?
While no one can dispute the environmental benefits of digital over physical, an issue that receives less airtime is the environmental impact of the servers that are required to power all this technology. As the uptake for these platforms increases, so do the emissions from their servers, and a major bugbear in any kind of carbon calculation is the notorious reluctance of the big tech companies to divulge the footprint of their global server banks.
Chivers concedes that “the impact of a giant server bank is real and serious” and that they are “growing all the time”—he also notes that factoring in the service data from Vortic’s technology providers for his report was complicated and time consuming.
Yet he is at pains to stress that the environmental benefits of using technology in this way greatly outweigh whatever negative effect the tech company’s servers may have. “The energy required to create and render one digital work of art or one digital exhibition is way less than keeping all the lights and heat on in a gallery for a month, or shipping people and art around the world,” he says.
Again, a multi-pronged effort is required. As with energy providers, it is up to art world consumers to hold their technology suppliers to account and demand full transparency in disclosing the power used to provide their services. Increasingly, companies like Amazon Web Services (the company Vortic uses to power their platforms) are designing greener data centres that are powered more efficiently via renewable energy sources and that use water more responsibly.
But more needs to be done. As Chivers puts it, “hopefully we can do all these things at once: reducing flights and energy use with the help of digital technology where appropriate, while also pushing for more efficient and cleaner practices by data providers and avoiding the over-use of unnecessary technology wherever we can. These are all things we’ll need to figure out together as we decarbonise the arts sector in response to the climate crisis.”
Because while looking at a digital work of art may never be the same as standing in front of the real thing, if we don’t change our ways, there soon won’t be art of any kind to stand in front of.
