‘Caravaggio would have murdered someone for a copy of Photoshop. Leonardo would have done far worse for a Claude Code subscription. Those are facts. Artists use whatever it takes. ‘Our world is made of digital stuff. We spend every day looking at glowing slabs of light. Our screens, phones, wristbands, jewelry, cars, and even refrigerators ingest every piece of microdata they can get their greedy little hands on. For every human eyeball, there are twice as many digital cameras; for every insect, 10,000 transistors. We have so completely cyborgified ourselves that the idea of a cyborg has become a quaint anachronism. ‘The same is true of art. In my own life, I learned to 3D model a sculpture before I learned about molding and casting, Photoshop before the darkroom. I never even bothered with linear editing (why would I?). Every painter I know mocks up their work digitally before touching a canvas. Every sculptor I know does the same in Blender or Rhino. Working in an analog medium usually means translating a digitally conceived idea into a physical, oddly retrograde form – like a musician putting out an LP record (also, I like LPs). Artists make art out of the stuff around them. They always have. Digital stuff is what’s around us.‘So why does digital art still provoke skepticism in many corners of the art world? Why have we as an industry been comparatively slow to adapt? Yes, much of the NFT craze coming out of COVID was deeply unserious, continuing to hamper perceptions of the field. But so was Zombie Formalism and any number of other speculative tropes. Of those unholy things, let us speak no more. What interests me is the work itself and the fast-evolving possibilities connecting the digital and traditional art worlds. ‘I’ll put my cards on the table. I believe in galleries. I believe in collecting. I believe in curation. I believe in criticism. I believe in museums, art schools, art history, and the community that we collectively inhabit. Above all, I believe ar