Kat Kitay Critiques Speculative Futurism in Digital Art

In a May 2025 ArtReview opinion piece, writer Kat Kitay argues that speculative futurism in digital art has become a hollow, techno-deterministic genre that normalizes defeat and aligns with accelerationist billionaires. Kitay criticizes artists like Pierre Huyghe, whose 2024 exhibition 'Liminal' at Punta della Dogana during the Venice Biennale features AI-edited films that aestheticize apocalypse, and Sybil Montet, whose video 'Geomancy' (2024) screened at HEK's Mesh Festival in Basel, for promoting a 'bad utopia' that capitulates to technofascism. She invokes critic Ben Davis's concept of 'bad utopia' from his 2022 book 'Art in the After-Culture' and contrasts these works with the profound narratives of Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Philip K. Dick. Kitay also calls out Grimes, Mac Boucher, Mariya Jacobo, and Eurypheus for their AI-generated tapestry 'Marie Antoinette After the Singularity #1' (2024), which she sees as propaganda for Sam Altman's ideology of abundance. She concludes that digital artists must resolve the contradiction at the heart of their practice to achieve an avant-garde.