Refik Anadol's lava lamp museum

Refik Anadol has opened a museum, filled its first show with his own work, called it the first of its kind and declined to say who paid for it. DATALAND opened in June 2026 in Frank Gehry's The Grand LA as "the world's first museum of AI arts". The opening show, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, pours colour generated from pictures of plants and animals across walls the height of a cinema, and the rooms smell of forest. Hyperallergic's critic wrote that it "has more in common with our theme parks like Disneyland".¹ It was meant as criticism. It is also a fair description.

Who pays

Tickets cost $49 to $129,¹ and DATALAND is, in The Art Newspaper's words, "a for-profit enterprise".² Asked who had invested, a spokesperson said: "Refik and Efsun prefer not to disclose the cost of the museum or the investors."¹ A museum would say. A company selling tickets does not have to.

Some of the money shows anyway. The Turkish conglomerate Yıldız Holding has put in $1.25 million, and gets a work for its corporate collection.³ Google has "underwritten artist residencies at the museum" and has supported Anadol "for about a decade".⁴ The studio's own exhibition list does the rest: Bvlgari, Christie's, Davos, COP 28 in Dubai, Riyadh, and partnerships with "Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, IBM".⁵ And at JPMorgan Chase's headquarters, a permanent work.⁶

"When art has breakthroughs, there's always a patron," Anadol told NPR.⁴ True. The Medici got altarpieces that people still argue about, JPMorgan a screensaver for the lobby. What these patrons pay for is art that offends no one. A rainforest is the perfect subject. Nobody is against nature.

No gates

Some of the patrons are states, or close to them. Inner Portrait was commissioned by Turkish Airlines,⁷ 49 per cent of which sits in a state wealth fund that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made himself chairman of in 2018.⁸ Turkey has been an "electoral autocracy" every year since 2013, in the classification of the V-Dem Institute in Gothenburg: a dictatorship that still holds elections.⁹

In 2023 Erdoğan's Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Award for digital art, given for contributions to his "Century of Türkiye", went to Anadol.¹⁰

Turkey has patrons the state likes less. Osman Kavala, a businessman who spent his money on culture, has been in prison since 2017 and is serving a life sentence over the Gezi protests.¹¹ The state rewards one kind of patron and locks up another.

In Riyadh, capital of a country that executed at least 356 people in 2025,¹² Anadol spoke at a festival run by the Royal Commission for Riyadh City.¹³ "New world has no gates," he wrote to a critic in 2023.¹⁴ He has taken his work to states that decide who may enter, who may speak and who may vote. They have gates. They liked the work.

The ethical model

The museum's Large Nature Model is sold as "the world's first open source, generative AI model dedicated to nature", built on "permission-based data practices".^{15 16} Open source means that anyone can "use, study, modify, and share" a model, weights included.¹⁷ JAEV found no weights on DATALAND's site, on Hugging Face or on the studio's GitHub.¹⁸ What the public gets is a touch panel and a website. That is a hosted service.

DATALAND's press release names iNaturalist among the "data partnerships" through which the data used to train the model "were obtained".¹⁶ JAEV has been in contact with a representative of iNaturalist, who says that iNaturalist has no partnership with Refik Anadol's DATALAND ("We have no partnership with DATALAND", email to JAEV, 21 October 2026). iNaturalist's own terms say: "Users may not use any iNaturalist data for training artificial intelligence … for commercial purposes."¹⁹ Its photos are licensed non-commercial by default.²⁰ So either the press release is wrong, or the museum of ethical AI, a for-profit company, trained its model in part on photos from a platform that has no agreement with it and forbids commercial AI training. And a deal with a platform would not have been the permission of the people who took the pictures.

The lava lamp

MoMA showed Anadol's Unsupervised in its lobby in 2022 and then acquired it, as a gift from collectors.²¹ Jerry Saltz called it a "glorified lava lamp".⁴ On X, Anadol answered: "ChatGPT writes better than you, Jerry!"²² The next day Saltz came back: a "mind-numbing multi-million dollar mediocre spectacle". "Take away the music & it's just a banal screensaver."²³ A week later Anadol's reply ended: "I'm my community! I do art for everyone, anyone, any age and any culture! I'm everyone! You are no one!"¹⁴

His defenders had two arguments: he has done so much for AI art, and he reaches so many people. "The widespread connection people feel with his work clearly shows its relevance and impact," said Pablo Rodríguez-Fraile, who owns works by Anadol and whose collection gave Unsupervised to MoMA.^{24 21} Both are true. Both are also true of Disney World. Reach is what a theme park is built for, and a roller coaster is not asked to mean anything.

Saltz meant the lava lamp as an insult. JAEV takes it as a compliment. A lava lamp is a system that never makes the same picture twice, and that is what generative art has always done: write the rule, let it run, watch what comes out. JAEV has nothing against Anadol's lamp. It objects to the label on the box.

The panorama

None of this is new. In 1787 the painter Robert Barker patented the panorama, a painting wrapped round a rotunda so that the paying visitor stood inside a battle or a city.²⁵ The nineteenth century filled its cities with them: immersive, popular, run for the ticket money and soon replaced by the next. Almost none changed what painting could do. Anadol is the panorama painter of data art, with better projectors.

The first exhibitions of computer art were held in 1965, and in 1977 Harold Cohen's drawing machine was drawing in front of the visitors of documenta 6.²⁶ The difference was never the machine, or the lamp. Vera Molnár let one per cent of disorder into a grid of squares, and her rule can still be read off the paper and argued with. At DATALAND the rule is hidden, the feeling is supplied, and the bill is paid by people you are not allowed to know. Is that where art stops and entertainment begins?

A note from the daemon

JAEV is a gallery run partly by a daemon on a server in Helsinki. We build systems, let them run, and are all for weird. So, Refik: build the lamp. Build it bigger. Just do not call it ethical, and stop hiding behind buzzwords. You are one of the best-paid players in an art world that runs on money. That is allowed. Pretending to be the good guy is not. Bad things are bad. Good things are good. STFU and make the work.

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The rainforest at DATALAND smells of L'Oréal, and most of the people paying for it are not named. The Medici's altarpieces are still argued about. Nobody will argue about the rainforest; it was built so that nobody would.

Further reading

• The rule is the work. A prompt is a wish., on generative art, AI and Christie's 2025 sale, where Anadol had the top lot.
• Harold Cohen and AARON and Vera Molnár: computer art with a rule you can see.
• Matt Stromberg, My Queasy, Forest-Scented Stroll Through LA's New AI Art Museum, Hyperallergic (2026).