The Unique Potential of Activist Art In Web3
In our most recent WAC Weekly we were joined by scholar and writer Charlotte Kent to discuss art activism in web3. We touched on environmental activism, how new funding models can create a more equitable ecosystem, and women in the NFT art space.
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Why is web3 interesting for activist art?
Charlotte Kent has spent the last couple of years writing articles about blockchain across scholarly journals, tech magazines, and online outlets. With many in academia dismissing NFTs and blockchain as a fad that will die any minute now, why did Kent decide this was worth investing so much of her time and attention in?
Around March 2021, she says, much of the initial focus on NFT art in the media was focused on record-setting prices. (Beeple’s “$69 million .jpeg”, etc.) “I think where the money goes and how people are producing capital, in whatever form it takes, is socially really important to look at … and I think this does say something about values and desires, and the types of societies that are being produced … but it’s not the only thing. And I got really upset that those were the only conversations that were happening.”
So many on-chain art projects were exploring the very same issues of financialization and environmental impact that the media were now covering long before any of this technology received mainstream attention, and nobody was more vocal about the environmental effects of NFTs than the artists themselves. As a matter of art-historical importance, she felt it was necessary to cover these projects in detail.
But while she wanted to see the value in these technologies, she was doing so with a critical eye. Technology alone can’t solve problems like environmental justice, economic inequality, or sexism in the art economy.
An emergent technology like blockchain “doesn’t appear out of nowhere, or with no foundation, we are still the foundation, like with all our flaws and biases and prejudices, we’re still we bring all that with us. … I felt like the other thing that happens frequently with technologies is that sort of utopian/dystopian binary of ‘it’s gonna save us it’s gonna destroy everything’.”
And as Fanny Lakoubay pointed out, when new technologies emerge it’s often artists who try to “break” that technology or take it further than commercial applications would, using the new possibilities it created to highlight social or environmental problems. If one wants to understand blockchain technology, blockchain art has been exploring it in depth for most of a decade.
And understanding the technology helps one understand the larger cultural project of blockchain. As Kent says, “blockchain does have, not only from its inception point with the [Bitcoin] whitepaper, a set of very clear ideologies. It has techniques that are demanding of its audience, and that is demanding of new ways of thinking.”
When so many people confess to just not understanding any of this technology or ideas, art can give its audience an emotionally or aesthetically engaging way. And with on-chain art being directly plugged into blockchain’s financial rails, it can engage with issues like financialization or energy usage by directly acting upon those systems. This makes blockchain particularly interesting if you think art can be a form of direct activism.
Artists started the conversation around web3 and the environment
That idea of “activist art” is particularly relevant, and urgent, when it comes to blockchain’s effect on the environment. In Kent’s view, “it’s not as if bankers, crypto financiers, and all the people involved with it as pure currency, were not aware of this. And they have so much power and involvement in this. At any point, they could have been the ones who started this dialogue and started pushing for change.”
One example Kent has covered is Julian Oliver’s 2018 work HARVEST. The installation consisted of two wind turbines powering a tiny crypto-mining operation housed in an abandoned shipping container. The piece harvested electricity from increasing wind and storms, “two symptoms of our changing climate”, and used it to mine the ZCash cryptocurrency. All proceeds from this piece were donated to climate change research. By streaming video and data from this operation, the piece raised awareness of the blockchain system and its relationship with the environment in a very explicit and thought-provoking way.
A more recent piece Kent has written about was Kyle McDonald’s Amends. This follows on from McDonald’s research into Ethereum’s energy usage, which we’ve covered before in relation to the climate impact of the art world and individual art institutions.
Each of the Amends NFTs corresponds to an NFT marketplace, and each one increased in price from its minting in May 2022 till Ethereum’s move away from Proof-of-Work. By tracking each marketplace’s activity on the public ledger, the NFTs increased their prices to proportionally offset the carbon emitted by each of these marketplaces.
While each NFT corresponds to a different nonprofit working on problems like ocean cleanup and carbon capture, the project’s revenue will be split evenly amongst the organizations he’s highlighted. It’s great that Ethereum is no longer using so much energy, but McDonald’s piece embodies an idea of “reparations” or “carbon debt” that the blockchain ecosystem should pay to have been a net positive for the world.
Epoch Gallery, new revenue models, and women in web3 art
The web3 art world inherits some of the larger tech industry’s issues around the proportion of women in prominent roles. But it also inherits the traditional art world’s problem with women artists in the mainstream: while around 70% of art students are women, they represent just 2% of the art market at auction, and it was recently found that paintings by men fetching 10x more at auction on average than work by women.
It’s something creative duo Operator have highlighted in their work Unsigned, referencing author Helen Gorrill’s observation that “the addition of a woman’s signature can devalue artwork to the extent that female artists are more likely to leave their work unsigned.”
100 women and non-binary artists in web3 contributed signatures to the project which then collated those signatures in a sold-out NFT collection on Objkt; the signature itself is the art. In this context, 90% of the primary sale and 10% of each secondary sale goes to the artist — and this is all on Tezos’s public ledger — highlights a need for awareness about whose work is valued and how revenue is being distributed. The now-mundane fact of on-chain transparency becomes part of the piece.
Elsewhere, artists and curators are experimenting with how funds can be distributed in the first place. In a traditional gallery showing, you might have celebrity artists whose work is guaranteed to sell while less well-known or otherwise marginalized artists are less likely to see any income.
The EPOCH gallery has curated several digital art shows, each in its own bespoke virtual space, in which the only NFT artwork being sold is the exhibition itself. Revenue is shared equally between the artists, recognizing that each one of them was chosen because they contribute to the overall experience of the virtual space.
Previously, 15% of the proceeds of EPOCH’s Cryosphere show went to conservation efforts in Alaska. Last year’s Unprotected show, very quickly responding to the repeal of Roe v. Wade in the USA, was able to raise funds for reproductive justice charities while public awareness was at a peak. Being able to curate a show this quickly is unheard of in the traditional art world, but for EPOCH it’s become standard procedure for moving attention and funding where it’s needed.
LaCollection’s Marlene Coburn tells us she’s been talking to artists about activism for a research project. She says that “when we asked them, ‘do you feel your art is activism? Do you feel you’re an activist?’ … it was actually very complicated for them as artists to say yes.” Many of them felt that all art can do is highlight the issues they care about.
But as Kent pointed out in the talk, blockchain — like any technology — is inherently political. And blockchain offers unprecedented room for artists to engage with issues in a very direct way, more so than “just” raising awareness. Artists have been exploring the most pressing issues in blockchain for years, long before the mainstream conversation caught up with them, and understanding this work is one of the best ways to understand how this technology might yet change the world.
WAC Weekly is part of WAC Lab, a new program unleashing the full potential of Web3 for the arts and culture produced by We Are Museums in collaboration with TZ Connect and Blockchain Art Directory, and powered by the Tezos ecosystem.
