Art X the Metaverse

• Kay Watson, Head of Arts Technologies, Serpentine
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The ‘metaverse’– broadly defined as an always-online and persistent spatial virtual world – has recently received global attention with Mark Zuckerberg’s claim to it with the rebranding of Facebook to Meta. However, the idea of a metaverse is not new and for the last few years commentators and sections of industry and society have increasingly told us that the metaverse will ‘change everything’. But what could that change look like for artists and their cultural institutions? How and why should they engage with the construction of the metaverse? And for whose benefit? Kay Watson, Head of Arts Technologies at Serpentine in the UK, unveils.