TORONTO — For internationally acclaimed conceptual artist Mitchell F. Chan, generative AI isn’t reshaping how art is being done. If anything, he argues, it has only sold the feeling that anyone can become an artist, without truly expanding the opportunities that art can offer.

“This technology is not an equalizer. It is not a technology that allows anybody to rise up to this level,” Chan said at The Logic Summit in Toronto on Monday. To him, AI art only adds credibility to artists already established in their careers, while making it more difficult for others to make their mark.

Chan focuses on economic systems, trading and crypto in his art; in his view, the art and finance worlds share similar struggles. Canada is a country that is “great for startups,” but is “bad for scaling,” he said. That’s reflected in Chan’s own career. His exhibits have spanned across the U.S., the U.K. and South Korea, but he has had little representation in the Canadian art scene.

Chan, who lives in Toronto, noted that many of his peers who have achieved both critical and commercial success needed to establish themselves outside Canada to kickstart their careers. “It’s a situation where a lot of artistic innovation and market success was seeded here in Canada, and then all the value has been captured elsewhere,” he said.

This tension comes at a critical moment when Canadian technological and cultural sovereignty has been hotly debated. Chan acknowledged that despite investing in and doing a good job at protecting its own cultural identity, Canada needs to open up to more global influences. Still, he said, the country’s art scene is “also this thing that exists to kind of soak up the froth of a decadent class.”

The crypto boom, he said, amplified a shift that began with conceptual art decades earlier: the detachment of art’s value from its physical form. ​​In 2017, Chan gained widespread attention with Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, a blockchain-based recreation of French artist Yves Klein’s 1950s experiment selling “immaterial” artworks. Through original NFT sales and royalties from resales, Chan made several million dollars in 2021.

That same year, the crypto market exploded in value, marked by examples like digital artist Beeple selling an NFT of his work for US$69 million. As quickly as it rose, the NFT market crashed, followed by the broader crypto market later that year.

Chan acknowledged the culture around crypto has since changed. What once felt like a progressive community that explores new ways to exchange and value art has now become, in his view, increasingly seems “to attract scammers.”

“Crypto is honestly where you can find some of the world’s worst people with some of the world’s dumbest ideas,” he said. “It’s really sad, because it was not always the case.”

Chan’s most recent project uses gaming as a social critique of capitalism. The “Zantar” series includes games such as Ladyboss and Moonboi. With Moonboi, Chan wanted to give people an illusion of agency as they guide a cube-like car through a colourful world, collecting coins. The problem is, he explained, the game is rigged, and it’s not the players in the driving seat.

Read more from The Logic Summit 2025 here.