Virtual Reality Asserts Itself as an Art Form in Its Own Right

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As virtual reality breaks into the art world at all levels, a host of questions about curation, conservation and commercial value is still being explored.

The Berlin-based artist Olafur Eliasson said that we were only in “the Stone Age” or prehistoric period for the medium.

“There is a new space out there where a lot more people will have access to artistic experience,” he said last week in a panel discussion here at the Art Leaders Network hosted by The New York Times. He added that “the quality of the glasses is getting so much intensely better” over the three years he has been experimenting with virtual reality.

The technology is far from ubiquitous, but companies such as Samsung, Google and Microsoft are invested in its future, and some recent studies forecast rapid growth for virtual- and augmented-reality headsets in the years ahead.

For the online platform Acute Art, which went live last fall, Mr. Eliasson created the work “Rainbow,” which he described in an interview at the Art Leaders Network as “abstract and immersive” but also “very playful.”

“You can put your hand in the rain and swish the drops around,” he said. “It has been a challenge to give it an ephemeral quality, but I am very excited about the result.”

In April, Acute Art’s VR Museum introduced a subscription program to experience works by Mr. Eliasson and the performance artist Marina Abramovic while distributing the output of five other artists free of charge for nonsubscribers.

The website works with three brands of virtual-reality headsets.

Mr. Eliasson envisions a future in which people access art “on a platform like Netflix” once the necessary equipment is more widespread and the business model more developed. “Rainbow” was presented in March at the contemporary exhibition space Kunsthal Charlottenborg during the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.

If virtual reality has proved useful as an educational tool through recent initiatives such as a re-creation of Modigliani’s last Parisian studio at the Tate Modern in London, it is still asserting itself as an artistic form in its own right. A panel discussion with Sandra Nedvetskaia, partner of the virtual-reality production company Khora Contemporary, and Edward Klaris, an adviser and lawyer specializing in intellectual property, addressed some of the issues at stake.

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