March is Women’s History Month, and instead of rehashing the same conversations about visibility and representation, I would like to highlight someone actually doing the work.

Kika Nicolela has curated a massive collection of Female Artists That You Need to Know on objkt.com. This is not a token gesture or a top ten list, but a serious, wide-ranging survey of work that functions as both celebration and correction. This kind of thoughtful labor should not fall to individual curators, but it does because the default mechanisms of visibility still militate against inclusivity.

This week, we published a conversation between the curator Anika Meier, the anonymous performance artist, OONA, and the artist duo, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, on The Art of Hacking Surveillance Systems. The article explores how artists are turning surveillance infrastructure against itself, exposing the logics of capture, control, and commodification that structure digital life. It is subversive, precise work that asks what resistance looks like when power operates algorithmically.

Such projects represent different approaches to the same underlying problem: making visible what tends to stay hidden. Whether that is undervalued artists or invisible systems, the work is about redistribution: of attention, agency, and power.

— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save

The number of leading collectors buying digital art grew in 2025, according to the latest edition of Art Basel and UBS’s Art Market Report, written by Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics, and published on March 12, 2026. The annual report, treated as a benchmark by auction houses and art dealers, also showed women artists reaching parity in the number of artists represented by galleries operating exclusively in the primary market.

The global art market grew by 4 per cent in 2025, the report finds, to an estimated $59.6bn, following two years of declining overall value.

“Across dealers working solely in the primary market and those in both the primary and secondary markets,” McAndrew’s report states, “the share of female artists represented grew by 4% in 2025 to 45%, its highest level to date. Galleries operating exclusively in the primary market have driven much of the increase since 2018 and, in 2025, reached parity between male and female artists on average. While those operating in both the primary and secondary markets remained lower at 41%, this represented a 5% increase on 2024 and is up from a low of less than one third (32%) in 2018.”

The report surveys 3,100 high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) across ten global markets which found that, across art formats, “paintings remained the most-purchased medium and the one that HNWIs had spent the most on, but activity levels and the share of spending across other mediums was higher in 2025 than in previous years”. Of the collectors surveyed who had bought fine art in 2025, “67% had purchased a painting, and 56% a sculpture, aligning with previous years”. The next most popular purchase, the report says, “with a large uplift in 2025”, was digital art, “with just over half (51%) of the sample having bought a digital artwork”.

These figures for the number of HNWIs making digital art purchases reinforce the trends reported in the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting in 2025 published on October 23, 2025. The Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report is published two weeks before the Art Basel art fair giant holds the second iteration of its Zero 10 section dedicated to art of the digital era, at Art Basel Hong Kong (March 27-29, 2026), following its debut at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2025.

Niklas Luhmann’s Art as a Social System (2000) applies his broader systems theory to the domain of art. I’ve been told that he’s unreadably dense, but the core idea is that art is not mainly about artists or values like beauty, or particular genres or practices—art is a self-reproducing communication system within society. The point is not to position subjects as performing behaviors. Rather, systems thinking emphasizes mutual relationality: actions and behaviors producing entities/objects/things and, likewise, things generating behaviors due to their milieu. 

As in his earlier work, Social Systems (1984/2013), Luhmann provides arguments to deontologize things. As he says, an “adequately stable system is composed of unstable elements,” explaining that the system owes “its stability to itself, not to its elements; it constructs itself upon a foundation that is not ‘there’, and this is precisely the sense in which it is autopoeitic” (1984/2013, 48). Luhmann’s autopoiesis refers to the self-referential and self-generating qualities of a system. His language presents the system as if it were a singular entity, but the point is a fluid set of relations that emerge into a system—that is the “foundation that is not ’there’” and which must be remembered. 

For Luhmann, systems are not static entities but plural moving parts and relations that coalesce and release. In this way, relationships and activities become significant to the things we see as distinct objects. This change requires us to consider what gestures, things, and ideas coalesce to (in)form the object of our study. Instead of thinking in terms of objects, Luhmann calls us to think of momentary confluences and focus on the network rather than the node. 

— Charlotte Kent is an arts writer and associate professor of visual culture at Montclair State University. With a background in philosophy and literature, she brings an interdisciplinary approach to visual art and digital culture with a current research focus on the absurd.