Blog series: New Media, Old Habits Digital Art Is Not the Easy Way Out: A Note for Young Entrepreneurs Entering the Art World

By Zeynep, Co-Founder, Lyart Gallery

There is an assumption I keep running into, in conversations with collectors, with older gallerists, sometimes even with other founders: that digital art is somehow the shortcut. That if you cannot paint, you make a digital piece. If you do not want to deal with materials, framing, shipping, conservation, you go digital instead, and it is automatically lighter, faster, easier.

Since Ecesu and I started building Lyart, this is the assumption I most want to push back on. Working seriously in new media is not the easy path. If anything, it demands a wider range of literacy than most traditional practice does. An artist now has to understand composition and narrative the way any painter does, but also software, tools, exhibition formats that did not exist a decade ago, and an audience whose expectations shift every few months. Less craft is not what is happening. A different, more demanding kind of craft is.

The market is not shrinking. It is reorganizing.

It is tempting to read headlines about a "cooling" art market and conclude that this is a bad time to be starting something new. The data tells a more interesting story. While overall market value dipped in the broader 2024–2025 cycle, transaction volume actually rose, and it was the lower price segments, the works under $50,000, that performed best, regularly hammering well above estimate. Meanwhile, the digital art segment specifically is projected to grow from roughly $6.7 billion in 2026 to over $13 billion by 2031, at a compound rate of nearly 15% a year, with online marketplaces already accounting for the majority of sales volume.

What this tells me is simple: the market is not contracting, it is redistributing. Value is moving away from the blue-chip ceiling and toward accessible, story-driven, digitally native work. That is precisely the space where a young gallery without a sixty-year legacy can actually compete, but only if it takes the work as seriously as the rest of the market is learning to.

Authenticity, not novelty, is what holds up

Here is the part I think gets missed in a lot of "art and technology" conversations: the rise of new media art is not a rejection of the human hand, and it should not be treated as a trend to chase for its own sake. As AI-generated imagery has flooded every feed, audiences have become hungrier for work that visibly carries the trace of its maker: a clear point of view, an intentional choice, a narrative about process. The new media artists whose work actually holds up are rarely the ones leaning on a tool because it is new. They are the ones who have done the work to understand the tool deeply enough to bend it toward something only they could have made.

This is the curatorial instinct we try to build into Lyart from day one, and it is also the line we are careful about as a gallery: we are not in the business of championing a technology because it is fashionable, and we are not interested in speculative hype cycles. When we represent an artist working in digital or mixed media, our job is to ask the same question we would ask of any traditional work, is there real intention and real knowledge behind this, before we ask anything about the medium.

What this means if you are building something new

If you are a young founder, in art, or frankly in any creative-adjacent field, trying to figure out how to compete with institutions that have decades of capital and relationships you do not have, here is what I would say, having spent the last year and a half building a virtual gallery from scratch:

Do not let the medium do the talking for you. A digital work is not interesting because it is digital. It is interesting for the same reasons any work is interesting: because someone thought hard, researched, made deliberate choices, and has something specific to say. If anything, hold digital and new media work to a higher bar of scrutiny, not a lower one, precisely because it is so easy to produce something that looks finished without much behind it.

Treat curation as your actual product. Anyone can put work online. The oversupply of shallow, derivative digital work is a real and growing problem, and audiences are starting to feel fatigue from it. A clear curatorial point of view, knowing why a piece belongs in your gallery and being able to explain that in plain language, grounded in real knowledge of the artist's process, is the scarce resource, not access to a platform.

Invest in your own literacy before you invest in a trend. We are not chasing whatever technology is loudest this year. Before we represent a piece that uses a new tool or format, we ask the artist to walk us through what the tool actually does and why it serves the work. If we cannot explain that clearly to a collector ourselves, we are not ready to show it.

Use the global reach, but localize the story. One of the most underexploited opportunities right now is geographic. Markets outside the traditional New York–London axis are growing quickly, with collector bases that institutional galleries have been slow to reach. For us at Lyart, that has meant being unapologetic about bringing Turkish artists and a Turkish curatorial voice into a global digital space, rather than diluting it to look more "international."

Expect to be both the artist's advocate and the business behind them. New media artists today are operating more like independent entrepreneurs than studio recluses, building their own audiences, managing their own brand, often researching their own materials and methods more rigorously than anyone gives them credit for. A gallery's value proposition has to evolve accordingly: less gatekeeping, more partnership, and a genuine willingness to do the homework alongside them.

Studying and building at the same time is not a compromise, it is leverage

There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with trying to build something serious while you are still a student. It can feel like the degree is a delay, something to get through before the real work starts. I have come to think the opposite is true, at least for this industry.

New media art sits exactly at the intersection of disciplines that most art education still teaches separately: market structure, operations, sustainability, organizational behavior, the economics of how value actually moves through an industry. Sitting in a classroom on global economics one week and then going back to negotiate a sponsorship deck the next is not a detour from building a gallery. It is the fastest way I know to stress-test an idea against a framework before it costs you something in the real market. A concept that only survives in a pitch deck and falls apart the moment you apply a proper cost-benefit analysis to it was never going to survive a real collector conversation either.

So if you are a student building something in parallel, my advice is not to treat your coursework as the thing standing between you and your venture. Choose it deliberately. Take the operations course that forces you to map your own process end to end. Take the sustainability or CSR module and actually apply it to your own business model, not a hypothetical one. Use case studies, feedback from professors, even disappointing grades, as free, low-stakes diagnostics on problems that would otherwise show up later with real money attached. Few people get institutional access to that kind of structured feedback loop once they have left school, and even fewer get it for free. Building and learning at the same time is not the harder path. Done with intention, it is the advantage most of your competitors will not have had the patience to use.

Why we are starting this series

Ecesu and I will be writing here every two weeks, sometimes together, sometimes solo, about exactly this intersection: digital art markets, new media practice, and what it actually takes to build a serious art business in a space that is too often dismissed as a shortcut. Not theory for theory's sake, and not enthusiasm for whatever is trending. Practical, researched observations from two people building one of these platforms in real time, in Istanbul and Paris, trying to bring a global conversation into our own language and back out again.

If there is a thread that connects everything we plan to write about, it is this: digital does not mean disposable, and new does not mean unserious. The art that will matter, in any medium, is the art behind which there is real depth, and our job as a gallery is to find it, understand it well enough to explain it, and give it room to be taken seriously.

Lyart Gallery is a digital platform representing emerging contemporary artists through immersive virtual exhibitions. Follow our blog for biweekly notes on the art market, new media practice, and building an art business from the ground up.