Why does art still have to be either digital or analogue?

The art market seems settled on a binary that makes less sense every year: art is either digital, meaning it lives on a screen (and/or printed as an edition), or analogue, meaning it never touched a computer. Fairs, prizes, and open calls are all built on this split. Yet more and more of us working with code produce hybrid or fully analogue objects. In my case, custom code workflows, machine logic and public-domain archives at the start, algorithms and manual digital edition in the middle, and at the end hundreds of hours drawing by hand with ink on paper, one unique object, every digital file destroyed. No prompting anywhere in between. Where does that sit? Nowhere, according to the gatekeepers. This is thankfully changing, but too slowly.

And the binary comes with a second assumption baked in: that computation means typing a sentence into a box. Twenty-five years of code-based practice now reads, to most curators and collectors, as "person who prompts" or (perish the thought!) as “AI art”.

I exhibited algorithmic work at the Reina Sofía Musem in Madrid back in 1999, decades before all this “AI art” nonsense, and still today I get called an “emerging artist”, because the system has no category for radically hybrid work and no category for practitioners who don't fit the young-discovery narrative either.

Curious whether others here feel the same squeeze. Is the digital/analogue split still useful to anyone except the people selling booths, or is it time to retire it?