Cultural Infrastructure for the Civic Imagination
A Hypothesis of Change
Exploring potential forces of change shaping emergent futures within the art ecosystem
Driving Force # 1: Capture the Flag
All aboard the Hype Train
Art is a financial commodity. Leveraging any artist or artwork — whether a digital NFT or oil painting into a speculative investment, reinforces the neoliberalist system mechanics at play within both digital and physical spheres of the art system. Auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s are riding the hype with market-defining NFT sales such as Beeple. Institutions like these are capitalising on the digital hype, simultaneously critiquing and affirming the incumbent system state. A new challenge has emerged around the demarcation of art asset classes; as we see the the economic art system bifurcate into crypto fine art assets and NFT art ‘products’.
Companies like Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) who primarily create NFT PFPs (personal profile pics) are creating ‘art products’, with additional value mechanisms through increased utility with tokenized community access, social currency and personal branding.
Projects like these represent an entirely new commercial space outside of the traditional art system, but these ‘art products’ continue to trade on scarcity and FOMO (fear of missing out); they play to the historical market-driven constraints but with new strategies and competitive strengths not accessible to fine art institutions.
Art’s incumbent economic system is alive and well; albeit with new additions to its value transfer mechanisms.
Even the language of “NFT Drops” suggests that art is something that can be done quickly and operates in a cycle — more akin to a product than an artwork. What they do not do however, is deliver on the web3 promise to liberate artist sovereignty and shift the gatekeeping dynamics of power, access and value. As museums, art galleries and exhibition houses rush to capitalise on digital art trends, together with speculative collectors and NFT project creators — we see the capitalist system continues to uphold market constraints, distribute legitimacy through the government of systemic relationships between people, objects and value.
Contributing Forces of Change
Generative Art
Offline actors capitalising on digital art
A product by any other name
Avoiding first move failures
Digital gatekeepers
Driving Force # 2: New Economy Mechanics
Power to the People
Historically the connection between artist and collector is intermediated by these system actors — the dealers, galleries, curators or auction houses, and connection between artist and viewer or collector, is limited to those with the purchasing power to buy. Often at the core of incumbent markets, is some kind of broken logic. Here we see that the greatest source of power within the historical art system has been derived from it’s ability to control and constrain the value transfer mechanisms of legitimacy and value, through distribution and curatorial / critical discourse.
The challenge with the ‘art elite’ controlling this Overton window, is that the historical system necessarily assumes a homogenous undifferentiated market system of viewers, collectors, creators and appreciators. As physical galleries rush to capitalise on digital art, they cripple the potential network effects that the internet offers, by bringing the same system view to the digital space. Although the internet and technology progress has shifted the trajectory on both the supply and demand axis; large tech monopolies have thwarted the internet’s promise of freedom and connection, and replaced it with a system of data extraction and surveillance.
Web 2.0 holds its own monopoly on search discovery, network effects and reputation, fuelled by advertising dollars, which creates a scaled constraint and further ‘lock in’ within art’s socio-economic ecosystem. The ‘NFT branded product’ market benefits from these system constraints (both physical and algorithmic), and in many ways, operates as an isolated ecosystem, detached from the broader socio-cultural ecosystem of the art world. But there is reason for hope; every crypto fine art sale or community connection, shifts the Overton window a little. The rise of the digital-native art ecosystem has amplified the increasingly interconnected, co-dependant web of relationships and connections at play within the art world, which operate within a complex ecosystem of economics, politics, culture and community.
Likewise crypto economic networks have enabled more fluid organisation and connection to form on the internet around specific economic, political or social purposes. The increasing development of decentralised finance, offers the potential for more flexible, equitable, sustainable economic models, surfacing new possibility for art futures within the digital space.
Perhaps more importantly, web3 infrastructure has introduced the possibility of social capital at scale, within the art system for the first time. Social capital arises from a combination of network structure, strength of ‘ties’ and is further amplified by ‘value signals’ that can be surfaced, understood, built upon and shared — enabling the digital-native art system to reframe creating, curating and collecting as a collective community mechanism.
Contributing Forces of Change
Digital-native value mechanisms
New rules for a new economy
Scaleable curation and discovery
The real value of blockchain
Remuneration and IP
Reputation signals and network effect
A living wage for artists
The longtail of artists
Driving Force # 3: The Message of Medium
Extending the ART Ecosystem
The explosion of generative art tools and NFT collections has given rise to much debate about what constitutes art. Like all new mediums (street art is a good example), the more interesting question is — what is inherently different about digital art? If true art is revolves around the artist telling a compelling story that only they can tell — why is digital the medium they choose to tell that story? What opportunities does digital art offer (think audio visual art, glitch art, evolving fine art NFTs) that is not possible in any other medium? and likewise, is the story being told — relevant outside of the digital ecosystem?
Artists who develop their craft will be able to use specific mediums to tell their stories in nuanced ways that you can’t use and other mediums. You can tell different stories of photography than you can’t glitch. You can tell different stories with 3D renders than you can’t with photography. All these different mediums offer different opportunities to be able to share a narrative. When it comes to digital-art modalities, the challenge for artists is how to use those mediums to tell a story in ways or share a perspective or an idea, that you can’t do in the other mediums.
By viewing the debate through this lens, we can see clearly that NFT PFP (personal profile pic) collections are not so much forms of ‘art’ as ‘artistic products’. Likewise the debate about whether an artist has used a generative tool, becomes less important than whether they have told a compelling story or offered a compelling perspective that happens to have been created digitally.
It also throws a new light on the simplistic ‘NFT-isation’ of existing physical artworks. Without a translation of the physical into some new digital value offering, these represent remnants of the old system, more an attempt to capitalise than to communicate.
Contributing Forces of Change
A compelling story of medium and message
Digital-native value mechanisms
Digital to physical experiences
Expanding the art ecosystem
Driving Force # 4: Glitching the System
Digital Disobedience
Glitch art is more than aesthetics; it is the aberration of the foundation of something. Glitch art is fundamentally about attacking the makeup of existing structures by breaking the code which underpins the original image in order to create something new. Glitching the System is about pushing the boundaries of conventional constraint, attacking the systemic structures which benefit one group over another in terms of financial flows, artistic sovereignty and narrow definitions of value and legitimacy.
The crypto-based digital art system has had limited success to date in catalysing a new scalable economic model for art; but it has further revealed the inherent inequality within historical art system dynamics.
Therefore ‘glitching’ represents not just an art form or conceptual approach to art, but a posture toward transformation which neither accepts nor seeks validation in the current system.
Therefore it doesn’t matter whether NFTs are decreasing in popularity or digital art is losing hype, these rich contexts give rise to new movements which cannot be reduced to the performance of an asset class — especially when viewed through a narrow capitalist lens. What matters is digital art’s potential to help us actively reimagine the art ecosystem and resultantly, how we interact, work, understand, know and connect with each other. That is to say, it’s transformative potential is in its reimagining of the social, cultural and economic systems of possibility through the lens of art.
Contributing Forces of Change
New rules for a new economy
Value production + value extraction
Artistic sovereignty
Digital gatekeepers
Security + Authenticity
The Longtail of Artists
Driving Force # 5: Existential Crisis
Roles and Definitions of Art
The existential crisis apparent in the art ecosystem right now could be described as a polycrisis, albeit on a smaller scale than the context within which this term is often applied.
Art-as-asset vs Art-as-civic-function
There is a longstanding tension between the defining role of art-as-asset in an era of unsustainable growth and the capitalist mechanisms which determine who is able (and allowed) to participate, versus the social civic possibility art offers if invited to participate beyond its own boundaries.
Definitions of Art
Real Art is relevant and meaningful outside of the medium within which it was created. At heart, it is about a compelling story being told through a particular modality. Yet the debate around whether digital art is in fact ‘art’, the role of generative tools and the impact of NFT ‘art products’ have clouded the debate, particularly as it relates to the economic art system.
It’s worth remembering that a similar debate surrounded street art in the early days, until artists like Banksy rose to fame ignoring the constraints of what mainstream culture defined as street art — forcing an expansive definition that considered aesthetic, placement and also relevance to the culture of street art rather than just the modality itself.
The impact of AI on Art
Art has a history of disruptive technologies from the introduction of paint brushes and photography, to screen printing and printmaking. There is a long history of creative conservatism toward new technologies, each generation believing the ‘ease’ or ‘accessibility’ of the latest technology will somehow degrade art or reduce it to its material components.This confusion of ‘ease’ with laziness has proven to be ill founded as each technology has developed as an artistic medium within its own right.
The social model of change and adoption sees these technologies embraced by creative progressives despite the decries from critics and cultural conservatives; until eventually the talented artists who develop new techniques and native-modes of production, move from reject to revered.
As the artistic ecosystem develops, we will see artists who have honed their craft, telling a story that only they know how to tell, leveraging a medium to tell that story, that enables them to tell that story in a particular way that could only be told through that medium.
There is a possibility that AI’s role in democratising creative production and the plethora of platforms for doing so, may cloud our understanding and expectations for a period of time. This does not however, invalidate it altogether, but it does create structural tension within the emerging digital art ecosystem.
Contributing Forces of Change
Reputation signals and network effect
Expanding the art ecosystem
Open access imagination
A living wage
A product by any other name
Driving Force # 6: Artivism
Imagination Infrastructure for Positive Human Futures
As we look toward the future beyond the art ecosystem, we see the rise in SMART technology and a deep global commitment to ‘creative cities’ underpinning the shift toward healthy, positive, sustainable human futures.
This offers new opportunity for the art ecosystem to extend its reach beyond its own boundary and potentially play a wider role in society at large. A shift like this can’t be driven from within the art system, and must be catalysed through the interplay of policy, urban planning and governing systems, enabling a reimagining of art as fundamental to citizen wellbeing. The roles art might play are not limited to aesthetic or entertainment, but will recognise art’s potential to communicate, to connect and to commune; simultaneously encouraging us to hold space for reflection, and galvanise the momentum necessary to catalyse change.
We may see arts and popular culture become more important as critical agents in the preservation and challenge of inclusive cultural memory. Critical to these future possibilities is the debate around universal basic income for artists, and the emerging role of art as civic infrastructure for the imagination.
Art may be one of the foundational components we need to bridge post capitalism with alternate futures. The potential experience of digital artists’ immersion in emerging web3 economic systems and value transfer mechanisms, together with the social experience of operating within a collective communal space of creative abundance, might be just the change we seek.
Contributing Forces of Change
A living wage for artists
Smart creative cities
Digital-native value mechanisms
Open access imagination
Open access social change
The Future of Art in a Post-digital World / Further Reading
Part # 1: How might the future role and value of Visual Art be transformed in a post-digital world?
Part # 3 : What role might art play in our ability to imagine alternative positive human futures?
Part # 4 : Exploring potential forces of change shaping emergent futures within the art ecosystem
Part # 5 : Possible Art Futures — Three Stories of (Post) Growth, power, Art, Ecology and Activism
