Anxiety about artificial intelligence and the arts usually concerns replacement. Pearl Lam, speaking on Wealth Office, turned the question round. In her view the art most exposed to AI is the art that art schools have prized most highly, and the skills they have looked down on may become the most valuable.

The vulnerability of the concept

Lam's argument is direct.

One thing, I always say that if you have an AI, you don't need conceptual art because you just type what you want and then everything will come out.

— Pearl Lam, Wealth Office

The same applies, she suggested, to how an installation should look. If the idea is the work, and a machine can produce both the idea and its visualisation from a prompt, the scarcity that supported conceptual practice begins to erode.

She connected this to art education. Major art schools, in her account, teach students to write concepts, while the craft of painting and of making sculpture has long been looked down on. Over the next 10 to 20 years she expects that hierarchy to shift. An artist who can paint, or craft a sculpture by hand, will be looked at very differently, and valued differently.

The prediction runs against several decades of art-world fashion. It also implies that technical skill, often treated as secondary to the idea, may become a primary source of an artist's distinctiveness, and so of the scarcity on which any market for their work depends.

For collectors, this is a question about what will hold value. Lam's wider test for an artist's market is credentials, which today come from museum collections, museum exhibitions and important private collections. If technology changes what institutions and collectors consider scarce, the credentials may follow.

Immediate emotion and short attention

Lam also drew a distinction about audiences. Conceptual art, she noted, has to be read before it can be appreciated, and Generation Z, raised on Instagram and short-form content, has little attention span for that. Her artist Mr Doodle surprised even her with his appeal to young audiences. Viewers see the work, resonate with it at once, and it makes them happy.

She placed this alongside a trend Michael Macfarlane raised, in which young collectors are driving demand for jewellery and watches while artwork softens at auction. A watch or a piece of jewellery is worn and seen. A work that gives immediate emotional pleasure competes on similar terms. Work that depends on explanation competes less well.

In Lam's account, this does not mean young people are indifferent to art. Art is difficult to approach, she said, for anyone not brought up with it or without a passion for it. The works that reach a new audience first tend to be those that communicate visually and at once, which may give craft and direct aesthetic appeal an advantage that the conceptual tradition lacks.

Homogeneity is a commercial problem

Macfarlane raised the argument that algorithms are making the world look the same, citing the uniformity of independent coffee shops designed to suit Instagram. Lam agreed that the world is becoming more homogeneous, because people are uncomfortable with difference. Her diagnosis placed less weight on the technology itself than on the people who pay for creative work.

AI, she noted, draws on existing data and uses it to create, so its output lacks difference. Clients, for their part, want profit, safety and security. A business commissioning a design will ask for something similar to what has sold before, close enough to feel comfortable. Difference attracts judgement, and business avoids judgement. She recalled the criticism that greeted the London restaurant Sketch when it opened with a three-Michelin-star chef, because people judge only from what they have already experienced.

Today what we need to do is to celebrate differences.

— Pearl Lam, Wealth Office

The problem, in her words, is less about AI than about whoever is commissioning the work. The same caution reaches into institutions. Museum curators, she observed, must now sell tickets to survive, and so show work that will draw crowds. The job of supporting emerging artists has fallen largely on galleries, which face the high costs of operating globally and find it hard to show work of low value.

Where private capital fits

That observation brings the argument back to collectors. If museums are constrained by ticket sales and galleries by cost, private patrons become one of the few sources of support for work that is unfamiliar. Lam accepted, in certain ways, Macfarlane's suggestion that private wealth and the art ecosystem depend on each other. The whole ecosystem, she said, will have to change, and technology will play a part, though no one yet knows how.

Her argument suggests a direction for those who collect with a long horizon. If AI makes the generation of concepts and images cheap, scarcity moves toward work that can only be made by hand, and toward judgement that resists the comfortable average. Collectors who back difference, in her terms, are backing the part of the creative world that machines are least able to supply.