Zero 10: Digital Art at the Heart of Art Basel Miami. What are the signals?

Courtesy of Art Basel

"Zero 10 reflects a strategic conviction: digital art is no longer on the margins; it has become an integral part of how art and the market are evolving in real-time," stated Noah Horowitz, CEO of Art Basel, presenting the new platform at Miami Beach 2025. Strategically, Art Basel is not simply adding a thematic area; rather, it is systematizing the idea that art in the algorithmic era deserves a dedicated curatorial infrastructure.

In the floor plan, Zero 10 occupies a central position, in dialogue with Meridians, and brings together twelve galleries and digital-first platforms: from Pace to bitforms, from Art Blocks to AOTM, and including Beeple Studios and SOLOS. The visitor does not enter a “digital ghetto,” but a cluster that places generative on-chain works, robotic installations, immersive environments, and AI-driven works side-by-side. The result is a continuous narrative between physical and virtual: not two worlds that tolerate each other, but a single exhibition pipeline where the technology changes, not the cultural ambition.

Eli Scheinman, curator of the section, primarily defines it as a systemic gesture: “Zero 10 brings together key forces in the digital art ecosystem — artists, studios, and galleries — whose practices are redefining how art is produced, viewed, and collected.” The point, therefore, is not to list possible “new media,” but to sanction that these practices now have critical mass to be at the heart of the fair and speak to the present, not as an exception but as a cultural infrastructure.

Zero 10 installation view, Courtesy of Art Basel

The Market Data: Not Substitution, but Integration

Behind this institutionalization is not just a curatorial intuition. There is, above all, a shift in collector habits. The Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025 indicates that digital is now among the top media for spending among the high-net-worth, and that more than half of those interviewed purchased at least one digital work between 2024 and 2025. The most interesting data, however, is hybridization: many digital collectors also buy physical works. It is not a replacement, therefore, but an expansion of the portfolio and language.

In parallel, various sector reports estimate very rapid growth in segments related to generative AI applied to art (tools, services, production, and related industries), with high annual rates in the coming years. Different numbers, different methodologies: take them as signals, not as oracles. The point is: if Art Basel invests in a stable infrastructure, it is saying that the demand is no longer episodic and that the pipeline can sustain standards, curation, conservation, and collecting.

How long will we have “digital sections”?

Here, a parallel that is not very glamorous but effective is useful: the “ebusiness” departments in companies at the beginning of the two thousands. At the time, online business was important enough to merit a dedicated structure, but still perceived as separate from the “real” company. Then, within a few years, digital stopped being a department and redesigned the entire enterprise: it no longer made sense to call it “e-” because it was everywhere.

Digital sections in art fairs function in the same way today: they are transitional devices. They serve to make a transformation visible, create a space for literacy for collectors and operators, and concentrate experiments (including business models) in a recognizable and communicable area. It is reasonable to think that they will last until a significant portion of galleries spontaneously bring digital practices to the “generalist” booths, making an explicit enclosure superfluous.

Two Scenarios for the Next Decade

Let's try to imagine two scenarios for the future. In the first scenario, which we define as “total permeation”, digital ceases to be a category and becomes the invisible infrastructure of the art system. Generative and algorithmic practices become a stable part of the programs of blue-chip galleries, museums, and pavilions, alongside painting and sculpture, without labels like “crypto art” or “AI art.” Fairs no longer dedicate separate sections: every booth integrates displays, AR layers, on-chain components, or algorithmic protocols as an ordinary element of the exhibition practice.

Here, the relevant distinction is not between digital and non-digital, but between works that use code as a superficial effect and works that adopt the algorithmic paradigm — systems, rules, data, interactions — as their conceptual core. Generative art no longer appears as “replicated”: it becomes a structural grammar that also informs seemingly traditional practices, from painting to sculpture, up to architecture and urban media.

In the second scenario, which we could call “pre-existing duality”, the distinction between digital and non-digital spaces persists longer, perhaps due to institutional inertia and audience segmentation. Fairs maintain platforms like Zero 10 for marketing, sponsorship, and flow management reasons, leaving digital as a “special zone” even when it is already integrated into the practice of many artists. In parallel, a part of the digital ecosystem (NFT platforms, virtual worlds, proprietary metaverses) continues to develop a semi-autonomous circuit, with its own logic of validation and market.

The risk, here, is a prolonged fracture: on the one hand, a digital art pushed towards spectacularity to command attention; on the other, a more “slow” contemporary art that incorporates digital only at the infrastructural level.

Beyond the Enclosure: The Digital Paradigm

In both scenarios, generative digital art is configured less as a closed category and more as a transversal paradigm: it does not only produce objects, but defines rules, protocols, relationships between human and machine, between data and imagery. Data and the algorithm are part of the form; indeed, they determine it.

And yet, in the history of art, form and aesthetics have almost always sought to stand on a different plane from the medium: as if the work could “exceed” its own technology, despite being generated by it. Every medium, when it truly enters art, is made transparent; it is not a theme, but a condition, an infrastructure that enables the form without taking the spotlight.

Digital complicates this mechanism because it makes visible what remained implicit in other media: the rule. If in a painting the “procedure” is hidden in the artist's hand and time, here the procedure is the code; if in photography the world is sampled by light, here it is sampled by data. We are not just looking at an image, but a system that produces images; not just an object, but a set of constraints that generates objects. This is why the stake is not the “tech” surface, but the conceptual quality of the structure.

When this transition occurs, the question “is it digital?” progressively loses interest, because digital is no longer a label but a way of giving form, a grammar. And then the enclosure of the “digital section” tends to evaporate, as happened to “ebusiness”: not because digital disappears, but because it stops being a separate place and becomes the operational background through which the art system — production, exhibition, collecting, conservation — reorganizes itself.

This is where the issue becomes truly interesting: the epistemology of form in the age of code. We will return to this with a dedicated series of articles.