Dario Buratti on defending generative art's aura against data-spectacle

In an article on Artribune, artist Dario Buratti argues for a distinction between "data-spectacle" and "Opera-Sistema" in generative art. He cites Hyperallergic's review of Refik Anadol's Dataland museum in Los Angeles, where data becomes the star rather than a tool. Buratti points to the Artsy AI Survey 2026, which found only 9% of over 300 galleries consider AI-generated art a legitimate medium, while 25% see it as destabilizing. He proposes the "Opera-Sistema" concept, where the artwork is the generative grammar (sources, thresholds, dataset, editing, display) rather than the output. He traces this lineage to Allan Kaprow's Happenings, Process Art, and Roy Ascott's telematic art. Buratti references Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora's description of AI's "AURA" as a sublime of ubiquitous automation on e-flux. He contrasts this with another sublime arising from what the machine processes. The article mentions Art Basel's Zero 10 section curated by Trevor Paglen and a collective of 1,800 names in Rome as a social opera-sistema. Buratti insists that defending generative art means defending the threshold where data remains a tool, not the spectacle.