This pattern is hardly new. The art world has encountered it repeatedly whenever a new medium emerges. In the nineteenth century, early photography provoked long debates about whether the mechanical capture of an image could ever rise to the level of art, with critics and practitioners often more fascinated by the chemistry and apparatus than by the pictures themselves. A century later, the arrival of video art in the 1970s produced a similar moment: artists and audiences alike were dazzled by the novelty of portable cameras and monitors, sometimes mistaking technical novelty for aesthetic achievement. The digital art boom of the 1990s repeated the cycle once more, with endless discussion of software, pixels and processing power, while the visual outcomes frequently struggled to justify the technological excitement surrounding them.

The hype surrounding NFTs simply repeated this familiar pattern. When new technologies enter the art world, they are often embraced first by those fixated on the mechanism itself. In their obsession with the how, they never truly grapple with the what – the aesthetic or emotional value of the result. The techno-disciples become so entranced by the tools that the final outcome becomes an afterthought, proving once again that a high-tech delivery system can never disguise a complete absence of substance.

The use of Artificial Intelligence in art, however, is an entirely different matter. Almost no artists – and certainly very few artists of real standing – were intricately involved with the construction of NFTs. The techno wizards literally became the NFT artwork. In the brave new world of AI, however, artists are using it as they would a paintbrush or a Hasselblad camera, augmenting their own extraordinary creative abilities with a new visual tool. Great artists can use AI, whereas with NFTs, only the techno wizards could truly operate the machinery.

My colleagues and I are boots and all behind extremely good artists using AI. After many decades of exhibiting artists across the world, Jim Naughten – a British artist – is the first non-ANZA (Australian and New Zealand) artist, so to speak, that the gallery has ever exhibited. In doing so, we have broken our founding rule of exhibiting only Antipodean artists, drawn from a shared culture and visual history that my colleagues and I know and understand. And we have done this for a very good reason.

Naughten’s work explores our complex and fragile relationship with the natural world. Originally trained as a painter – there you go – he now works primarily with photography, digital manipulation and, more recently, photography and Artificial Intelligence.

Naughten is a bridge from the greater classicism of our previous art world to a new visual art world – drawing on a deeply creative, classically trained well of experience to champion the new frontiers of the analogue in photography, commingling with, and being extended by, the creativity of AI, instigated, directed and orchestrated by the deeply capable.

Naughten creates surreal and vivid images – a pink zebra, neon gibbons, crested birds, roving wolves – that play with memory, imagination and anxiety. He unapologetically confronts our ecological crisis, unreservedly, through the shock of the new. His recent projects, Mesozoic (2023) and Biophilia (2025), reflect a growing urgency in his practice as he highlights biodiversity loss and environmental crisis.

Naughten’s artworks are meticulously constructed and painterly, shaped over time through layering, editing and digital techniques. His early influences include Diane Arbus and, more recently, Richard Mosse and Patrick Waterhouse. He often collaborates with ecologists and conservationists and has raised funds for the Jane Goodall Institute.

His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including at the Wellcome Collection, the Imperial War Museum, and the Horniman Museum in London, as well as at the Royal Academy of Arts and the National Portrait Gallery. His work is held in major public and private collections, including the Wellcome Collection, the Imperial War Museum, the Horniman Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida.

Through striking imagery and cutting-edge visual storytelling, Naughten seeks to reconnect viewers with the natural world – and to remind us of its wonder, its fragility, and our shared responsibility to protect it.