Birdsong in the Machine: What I Learned Curating Digital Art (and Does It Still Matter?)

The Diary of an Art Advisor

When the NFT boom hit full volume - sometime between the Beeple sale and everyone’s cousin trying to mint a pixelated gif of a badger in a tracksuit - I really wasn’t looking for a way into digital art.

But then a longtime collector I’d been advising called up with a proposition. He was curious, not evangelical. “Could you help me build an NFT collection?” he asked, as casually as if he were commissioning a few new works on paper. At that point, I knew just enough about NFTs to be sceptical, but he was serious, so I said yes. What started as a speculative side-quest soon became something more interesting.

I began speaking to artists - painters, sculptors, installation artists - about whether they’d be interested in making work in a digital medium. I’d frame it as an opportunity to rethink: imagine you’re a painter stepping into the print room for the first time. What could happen if you let the constraints and possibilities of a new medium loosen something in your practice? The best artists don’t mimic themselves in other formats - they explore. And many of them did. Very soon, they were working differently and the media began to push them.

At the same time, I had been in touch with SuperRare, one of the more credible NFT platforms. I pitched them a series of curated exhibitions - not just token drops or crypto-native gloss, but real shows, grounded in contemporary artists’ ongoing practice. They said yes.

Over the next year, I curated four exhibitions on SuperRare under the name Blackbird – each one a curated selection of established and emerging artists who were new to the NFT space. These included A Lot of What I’m About to Tell You Is Made Up, From Can See to Can’t See, The SuperRare Sessions, and Rogues Gallery. The artists weren’t digital-first. Most were traditional – painters like Ansel Krut and Lottie Stoddart, Phoebe Unwin and Elizabeth Magill, sculptors like Douglas White and sometimes Andy Holden. But what they brought was rigour, intelligence, a visual language honed over years.

They didn’t just upload JPEGs of previous paintings and call it a day. They experimented - sometimes awkwardly, sometimes brilliantly - with what the digital format could do. File size constraints became compositional challenges. Sound, animation, repetition, delay - all offered ways of thinking about image-making in new terms. It was exciting. And, for a while, it worked. Collectors came, artists sold, and there was a genuine dialogue beginning to form between two art worlds that had, until then, been largely suspicious of each other.

Eventually, I was invited to run my own curated gallery space within SuperRare - blackbird - with control over programming and curation. It was a chance to dig deeper, to bring more artists across the bridge, and to keep testing what this new space could hold. I loved putting together shows with diverse groups of artists - all pushing what they thought they could achieve. A particular highlight was The SuperRare Sessions which involved 8 music video by artists who were also musicians - including Jem Finer of the The Pogues and Emma Richardson - now of The Pixies. Then, in 2024, SuperRare shut the curated spaces down. The curated site and texts have gone, though the work remains at blackbird.

It wasn’t personal. The NFT market, as we all know, had begun to deflate. The speculative froth was drying out. The crypto bros were pivoting to AI. The cultural heat had moved elsewhere. And yet I still think it was one of the most genuinely interesting curatorial projects I’ve worked on - not because it was a technological breakthrough, but because it asked the same questions I’ve often asked: what happens when serious artists are given a new parameters? And how do we make sure the words around them - the writing, the framing, the selling - aren’t just noise?

Now that the mania has faded, it’s easier to think clearly. We can stop pretending every token is a masterpiece or every JPEG a revolution. And we can start asking: what is digital art, really? What should it be?

There’s a strong case to be made that digital art ought to be the most vital medium of our time. After all, we live digitally. We absorb love, horror, politics, and boredom through screens. Our memories are backed up to clouds, our movements tracked by phones, our social selves manicured through code. If painting once reflected the interior life of a body in the world, shouldn’t digital art reflect the fractured, flickering now?

And yet… so much of it is still so bad. Not technically. The technology is often dazzling. But conceptually, emotionally, aesthetically - it often falls flat. Too much digital art is content with spectacle. It wants to wow, not to last. It’s image-as-interface, not image-as-experience.

The best contemporary artists, whatever medium they work in, resist that. They don’t chase gimmicks. They look for form, friction, and depth. That’s why many blue-chip galleries held off during the NFT gold rush. They knew that most of what was being minted wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny once the hype cooled down. But the gap is narrowing. A new generation of digital artists are doing something else entirely. Petra Cortright, Ian Cheng, Auriea Harvey, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley - they’re not trying to “disrupt” art, they’re just making it, using digital tools the same way a sculptor might use plaster, or a painter might use oil: with care, attention, and a sense of history.

That distinction - digital with intent, not digital for the sake of it - is crucial.

So what should a that collector do now? The advice hasn’t changed: follow the art, not the noise. If you’re collecting digital works, look for the same things you would in any medium: rigour, resonance, depth, a coherent practice. Ask yourself: would this still move me if I saw it in ten years, out of context and out of trend? Ignore anything that’s too proud of its format. Being on the blockchain isn’t enough. Being generative isn’t enough. What matters is what it does, not how it’s made.

That means ignoring the algorithm and trusting your eye - and your gut. And yes, maybe occasionally asking someone who’s already done the deep-dive into both sides of the ecosystem.

And what comes next? Nobody really knows. That’s the honest answer. I hope painting remains - that's my real love, but something in me still believes that digital art - at its best - is just getting started. It needs time. It needs crossover. It needs artists from outside the echo chamber to keep poking at it, bending it, making it strange. It also needs better writing: less breathless cheerleading, fewer buzzwords, and more clear, thoughtful responses to what the work is actually doing.

That’s part of why I built the Birdsong app - a deliberately small, slightly silly tool for decoding gallery press releases and art statements. It lets you paste in a block of foggy art-speak and spit it out in Plain English, Poetic or ‘Humorous’. It’s a provocation, but also a nod to the same spirit that animated blackbird on SuperRare: clarity, experimentation, curiosity.

Because whatever format art takes - physical, digital, something in-between - it deserves to be taken seriously. And it deserves to be understood. We’re not done with digital art. We’re just out of the fever dream. Now the real work could begin.

Greg Rook

Blackbird Rook

Try Birdsong here

BlackbirdRook.com