Amiel Roldan: A Painter & A Curator ™

The Intermittent Aura: Gatekeeping the Archipelago in the Age of the Algorithmic Feed Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ August 21, 2026   Curatorial Frame   I write this as a cultural worker who has spent years standing at the soft edge of the gate—neither fully inside the white cube nor entirely outside it. My practice has involved selecting, framing, defending, and occasionally refusing artworks in a country where the gallery has never enjoyed the monopoly it once claimed in New York or London. The recent convulsions in the global art market—Pace Gallery’s 2026 decision to shed roughly fifty artists and fifty staff, Marc Glimcher’s admission that the mega-gallery model is “broken” and “unfixable,” and Ben Lewis’s sharper diagnosis of a crash rather than a polite correction—arrive in the Philippines less as catastrophe than as delayed recognition of a condition we have long inhabited.¹   The premise I wish to advance is straightforward yet uncomfortable: the withering of...

Algorithmic Bias in Art Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ August 21, 2026   Algorithmic bias in art refers to the ways computer systems—especially social media recommendation engines and generative AI image tools—systematically favor certain kinds of images, styles, people, and cultures while sidelining others. These systems are not neutral. They learn from vast amounts of existing data (mostly scraped from the internet) and from human design choices, then amplify patterns already present in that data. In the context of the declining power of traditional galleries and the rise of phone-based, direct-to-audience art practices, algorithmic bias becomes especially important. When artists rely more on Instagram, TikTok, or AI tools for visibility and sales, the hidden preferences of these systems start shaping what art gets seen, valued, and made. 1. Bias in Social Media Algorithms (Instagram, TikTok, etc.) These platforms decide which posts appear in users’ feeds. Their goal is usually to maxim...