We are living through a strange moment here in the early 21st century. Experimental art galleries become luxury showrooms. Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi fetched $450.3 million at auction. Galleries and Museums once the backbone of high, fine and contemporary culture are in decline. Many are closing their doors. Layoffs, struggling to stay relevant. This shift is captured with quiet power in Hito Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc. (2014), where the volatility of finance and identity crashes like a wave through the very concept of institutional stability.
Hito Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc. (2014)
At the same time, the world itself feels like it is unravelling. Climate collapse, rising inequality, and digital burnout are reshaping the way we live, think and create. The question many artists are asking is this: what is art really for? In works like Tomás Saraceno’s Aerocene project, we see glimpses of a possible answer — art that floats without fuel, that imagines survival through interdependence, and that invites the atmosphere itself into the conversation.
Tomás Saraceno’s Aerocene project
Artbox is a platform that tries to answer that question. It is not just an online shop for paintings. It is not a magazine or a marketplace. It is something in between and something beyond. A place where we take art seriously not just as a product, but as a practice. As something that holds meaning, holds tension, and holds us together. Like Tracey Moffatt’s My Horizon (2017), shown at the Venice Biennale, it holds space for ambiguity, pain, and unresolved longing without needing to explain it away.
Tracey Moffatt’s My Horizon (2017)
We believe art can do more than decorate walls or fill Instagram feeds. It can open space for thought, for feeling, for disagreement and for care. It can sit at the centre of hard conversations about value, identity and survival. It can connect people across time, place and difference. This is visible in the work of Richard Bell, whose Embassy (ongoing) re-stages the Aboriginal Tent Embassy as a travelling installation, collapsing the distance between protest and performance, politics and art.
Artbox supports artists who are asking difficult questions and taking risks. It will give collectors a way to support not just artworks, but the ecosystems that make them possible. And it will create space for reflection on where art comes from, who it speaks for, and where it is going. Like q, the work will be made within community, for community, and with deep attention to place and legacy.
This is an experiment. It will not be perfect. But we believe now is the time to try. Consider someone like Tino Sehgal, whose work resists commodification entirely — and yet remains unforgettable. Sometimes, what matters most is not the object but the experience, the gesture, the intention.
Artbox is where late capitalism meets a kind of new humanism. One that listens to old knowledge, values deep time, and begins again. It owes a quiet debt to artists like Bonita Ely, whose career-long engagement with ecological memory and feminist ethics reminds us that art’s role is not to win, but to witness, repair, and reimagine. If that sounds like a place you would like to help build, stay close. There is more to come.
Bonita Ely, THE MURRAY RIVER PROJECT, 1977
