The new art is an archipelago
This week, the curator Valentino Catricalà used the term “New Art” to describe today’s rapidly expanding and mutating art world, using the image of an archipelago—of fragmented yet connected islands beyond old categories and media—to point toward “a definition of art that is constantly rewriting itself”.
Meanwhile, Kevin Esherick is seeking to render himself “superfluous” by letting an AI model trained on his art stand in for him for a year. In his conversation with the artist, Michael Assis noted how such work lives naturally in a world of networked images, which is “a new form of social relations between machine and human”.
If the arbitration of taste in contemporary art has often occupied a cluster of islands in New York City, then an archipelago represents an apt expansion, and complication, of the city’s position in today’s multipolar, more-than-human art world. As ever, Right Click Save will continue to document the language by which humans and machines come to terms with their evolving entanglement.
— Danielle King, Head of Community at Right Click Save
Magazine
Installation view of “Strange Rules” at Palazzo Diedo Berggruen Arts & Culture, Venice, 2026, with work: Ken Stanley, Picbreeder (2008-2020). Photography by Joan Porcel
Kevin Esherick during After Marina, his recreation of Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present performance, at the opening reception of Esherick’s exhibition, “The Artist Is Absent” at Heft Gallery, New York, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Heft Gallery. Photography by Rachael Crowe
Forum
“What’s the last digital artwork that actually moved you?” The community responds to Aleksandra Art’s question
Index
Find articles on Larva Labs in the Right Click Save archive
The Right Click Save Index is a knowledge bank drawn from across the magazine’s editorial coverage. It shows how people, artworks, events, organizations, and ideas connect in our archive of more than 430 articles. Rather than a comprehensive biography or dictionary definition, each page surfaces the salient elements from our ecosystem. Readers can access the Index from the navigation bar of the website, through the Search window, and from in-article “cards” that link to Index entries, or direct to articles in the Magazine archive.
At a time when the NODE Foundation is advertising for a General Manager for the IP of CryptoPunks, readers can search on the Right Click Save Index page for articles on Larva Labs, creators of that ground-breaking early NFT collection. In October 2025, the founders of Larva Labs, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, spoke to Right Click Save on the occasion of the release of Quine, their first major project since 2021 and the final release on Art Blocks Curated, the platform’s foundational series.
“I like to have that feeling of uncertainty. We certainly had it with CryptoPunks where it was like, ‘Will anyone care about this?’”
— John Watkinson, co-founder, Larva Labs
Matt Hall and John Watkinson of Larva Labs. Photography by Mackenzie Davenport. Courtesy of Larva Labs
Trending
Happening
Visitors to “Processing” will be able to explore Serpentine’s forthcoming Future Art Ecosystems website, and create a printout record of their archival explorations in the form of a personalized data-poem. Photography by Hugo Glendinning
“Alighiero Boetti” at Dia Beacon is a combination of loan works and pieces from the Dia collection. The Italian Conceptual artist once told the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist that his great unrealized digital art dream was to run a “fax agency”—to send daily Boetti works to subscribers by landline facsimile machine (anticipating a series created by David Hockney in the late 1980s). Photography by Bill Jacobson Studio via instagram.com/diaartfoundation
Closing
Installation view, “New Humans: Memories of the Future”, 2026. New Museum, New York. Courtesy of New Museum. Photography by Dario Lasagni
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