Frieze London 2025: art as algorithm

Digital art is rewriting the rules of the field, revising the meaning of authenticity, and recalibrating the boundary between virtual and physical. Have we lost something here?

HENRY NICHOLLS / AFP

A guest walks in front of a work entitled 'Out of Chaos XIII' by artist Daniel Crews-Chubb at the Frieze London 2025 exhibition in London on 15 October 2025.

Frieze London 2025: art as algorithm

Fai Nasser

last update on 02 Nov 2025

For years, those who have wanted to know what is hot in art have come to Frieze London, held annually in Regent's Park in the British capital. Among the world's most influential contemporary art fairs, it shapes trends and pricing for the year ahead, as galleries, artists, and collectors converge at this renowned intersection of creativity, capital, and critique.

Frieze London 2025 confirmed digital art as the new dominant paradigm. Works, including interactive sculptures, are now generated by algorithms. In this context, the artist shifts from 'art maker' to art architect. This poses questions. Where do we draw the line between human creativity and artificial intelligence? Is artistic value an eternal measure, or merely a speculative inflation of the present moment?

Part philosophical crucible, the Frieze bubbles with inquiry. Its conclusions inform that the most perennial of questions: what makes it art? Likewise, what is authentic in an age of reproduction? The rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which represent unique digital assets, challenges the very concept of authenticity. In the past, artistic value hinged on rarity and material singularity: the artist's touch, the physical trace of tools on a tangible surface.

But in today's NFT-dominated era, works can be infinitely replicated and instantly transferred, making them scarce no longer. What does that do to value? Frieze London is a sign of the times. One of the world's premier art markets, it now sells works that are not materially unique but digitally verified.

HENRY NICHOLLS / AFP — Guests look at the work entitled 'Song to the Siren (Echo)' by Rafal Zajko at the at the Coulisse Gallery booth at the Frieze London 2025 exhibition in London on 15 October 2025.

Losing art's aura

In his 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, German philosopher Walter Benjamin considered the historical uniqueness of an artwork bound to its time and place—what he called its 'aura'. Can the aura of art survive when the artwork exists solely as a replicated string of data?

Conceptual piece 'The Merge' by the artist (or collective) Pak is an NFT artwork that sold for $91.8mn in 2021, shattering sales records by distributing ownership of the artwork among thousands. It exemplifies the transformation of authenticity into a digital certificate, severed from physicality and pegged instead to the number of zeros in an Ethereum wallet.

Part philosophical crucible, the Frieze bubbles with inquiry. Its conclusions inform that most perennial of questions: what makes it art?

Beyond the purely digital side of art, Frieze London 2025 featured interactive installations and virtual reality (VR) artworks. Visitors enter the exhibition tent carrying the weight of their physical presence, only to be invited to don VR headsets or engage with sensory interfaces. This poses a conceptual challenge: where does the artwork begin, and where does the body end?

No longer just something to be viewed, art is increasingly a space to be inhabited, the artist evolving from maker of fixed forms to engineer of experience, time and place becoming their palettes and easels. These immaterial works—comprising code and data—grapple with pressing material realities, such as ecological collapse and bodily vulnerability. Virtual reality is now a potent lens through which to see our physical reality. Is this an evolution in art, or a transformation of humanity itself?

Aesthetic algorithms

A quiet but powerful current runs through Frieze London 2025: the universal language of data. Once a medium of personal expression or creative intuition, art has become encrypted information, instantly transmissible across geographic and linguistic boundaries. This aesthetic algorithm endows digital art with unprecedented reach, elevating it to the status of a new global language.

Some wonder whether the transformation of art into data erodes cultural specificity. In seeking global resonance, digital art risks shedding its local contexts, becoming visual commodities that intersect with the metaverse and blockchain.

Frieze 2025, in embracing this digital vernacular, mirrors the artist's shift from storyteller to data analyst—using beauty to encode the complexities of our age. It is a moment of revelation: the greatest strength of digital art may also be its deepest challenge—to be accessible to all, yet intimate to none.

Wandering the halls of Frieze London 2025, it becomes clear that the fair is not simply a celebration of aesthetics or a showcase of market influence, but a collective interrogation of our notions of existence and value. Digital art has seized the spotlight, challenging authenticity through replication, dissolving the boundaries between physical and virtual, and transforming creativity into a global language of code.

In the void between the viewer and piece, contemplation emerges, and the relationship between human and machine is quietly redrawn. Visitors leave Regent's Park with a lingering philosophical unease. Are we shaping digital art, or is digital art shaping us? Perhaps, in years hence, Frieze London 2025 will stand as a testament to this pivotal moment, where art no longer seeks beauty but searches for meaning and a foothold in a world accelerating toward abstraction.

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