Reports from the Edge of Art and the Blockchain #1
By Ruth Catlow
We live simultaneously at the centre and at the edge of the world of networks. At its heart and at its farthest reaches.
This near mystical realisation was seized upon by artists of the early Web, as they experimented with new forms of participation and collaboration across global digital networks.
New artworld relationships were formed across distance and difference bypassing the artworld establishment and delight was taken in the disruption to artworld norms. Their work prefigured the development of the social web.
Artmaking in decentralised and distributed systems enabled by technologies like the blockchain is not new. Artists have worked together to form movements through history — Dada, Fluxus, Situationism — innovating new forms of organization, practice, and value exchange. Their artworks, interventions, motivations are now well documented by historians and museums.
What is less well understood is how this changed the relationship between living artists and collectors and its role in an artworld economy that garners great wealth while most living artists struggle to survive in even the world’s wealthiest cities. We need better bridges between artist-led ventures, and between the non-for-profit and commercial sector for a healthier arts ecology.
This all coloured my recent conversation with Arteïa’s Founding Director, Marek Zabicki, and UK Managing Director, Marianne Magnin as we explored the value that blockchain technologies bring to collecting art at the recent DAOWO Blockchain and Art Knowledge Sharing Summit UK, in Edinburgh.
What kinds of new relationships might spring up in decentralised platforms that bring artists and collectors together in new ways?
How will artists and collectors become visible to each other? And how will they value each other differently?
And for those who are fascinated by how the artworld shapes the wider world, what roles will these new relationships play in a reconception of social media as social value platforms?
Ruth Catlow is ICO advisor for Arteïa and writes a regular column Reports from the Edge of Art and the Blockchain. Catlow is co-author of Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain and co-founder and co-director of Furtherfield London’s longest running (de)centre for arts and technology and DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab.
