In the opening week of Art Gèneve and BRAFA, the Belgian art fair where you can admire more than 500 years of art history, the exhibition project curated by the algorithm at the base of the main social media platforms concludes on the other side of the English Channel.

But let me explain in a deeper way.

The art market exhibition, born in 1956 in Brussels, for the 2023 edition presents 130 galleries ranging from ancient art to contemporary creativity. The main thematic will be a focus on the Liberty style.
Therefore, from the 29th of January to the 5th of February, visitors will be able to admire the artistic proposal of cultural operators from as many as 15 countries, with also the presence of Italian gallery owners: the Milanese Ars Antiqua, Cavagnis Lacerenza Fine Art and Cortesi Gallery, among others.
Obviously, the usual interesting talks program and other initiatives in partnership with the Brussels museums will enliven the exhibition days.

In short, there seems to be nothing new under the sun.

However, it is enough to move about 300 kilometers away to taste what could be the future of the artistic world or at least one of its evolutions.
At the J/M Gallery, in the heart of London, "The Algorithmic Pedestal" brought together two curators: one human and one "artificial".







Considering the spreading of news that has taken place in recent months around ChatGPT and artificial intelligence systems, the discussion becomes even more interesting.
The creator of “The Algorithmic Pedestal” project is the Oxford Internet Institute researcher Laura Herman who invited the artist and curator Fabienne Hess to pick artworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access collection. All the works were related to the thematic of loss and Hess inserted them in her anthology “Dataset of Loss”, together with images that she has built over three years to counter algorithm-powered perceptions.
Instead, the other exhibition’s curator was Instagram itself.
Since November 2022 Laura Herman uploaded the same kind of images on a specific account (@thealgorithmicpedestal). Whichever posts the platform’s algorithm displayed in other users’ Home feeds are what made it into the show.
In other words this project proofed how Instagram’s algorithm is already influencing its users’ visual culture for purpose of marketing and selling rather than aesthetic or creativity.







This undoubtedly leads us to reflect on the biases still inherent in the current artificial intelligence mechanisms and on how they themselves need a sort of curatorship. A further problem could arise in the future, with the spasmodic increase in the amount of information to be managed and on which digital structures will feed. If this grows enormously, human intervention will become, on balance, impossible.
For the moment, however, we are still in time to reverse the process.