Reports from the Edge of Art and the Blockchain #5
By Ruth Catlow
“You are bidding on a piece of history” cries the auctioneer amidst whooping, cheering, laughing and gasping from the ecstatic conference delegates. The hammer comes down at $140K and former hedge fund manager, Mike Novogratz, becomes the proud owner of a very special Cryptokitty.
Helen Knowles was at the infamous New York Ethereal Summit auction in 2018. She captured the moment on video.
I was also there. This was the moment that I realised that collectors can use the auction to insert themselves into art history — acquiring an artwork that is also a souvenir of an epic art moment that they have created with their purchase.
Auction participants are Knowles’s muses and she thinks they should be paid.
Her artwork Trickle Down — A New Vertical Sovereignty, is a tokenised, four-screen video installation and soundscape attached to the blockchain. “Composed of auction scenes, auction performances and choral interludes”, the artwork features different auction “communities”, — from prison inmates (who auction the right to send plants to their loved ones in their absence) to market shoppers, to buyers at Sotheby’s auction house. The videos reveal their different attitudes, access to money, markets and art; exploring value systems and wealth disparity.
Knowles is making a conceptual artwork that is a machine that vends access to this installation as an art experience.
Perhaps the artworld cousin of the blockchain enabled Brave browser, her machine also allows audiences to decide who, among those people involved in the creation of her work, should receive micro payments resulting from the division of the inserted coins — including the subjects of the videos.
As she builds her art machine Knowles is also considering who else might qualify for payment including: anyone who has contributed to her thinking about the machine and all the employees of the funding bodies and galleries involved in its creation, exhibition, and circulation, now and into the future.
This is a curious thought experiment.
Imagine a machine that draws back a curtain on Leonardo’s Mona Lisa only when you purchase and feed a token to the machine. Now imagine being asked to make a decision about who you would like to receive the proceeds of that token: The artist (or their estate), the descendants of Ms del Giocondo, the studio assistants, anon, anon, and anon, and of everyone who ever worked at any of the palaces or galleries that ever displayed it: including all those who contributed to its upkeep at Fontainebleau, the grand Palace of Versailles, Le Louvre, etc, etc.
Why stop there? Should we not be paying the people (the architects and the workers) who built the road and bridge that appear in the background of this priceless artwork?
Knowles’s work challenges two untested artworld assumptions: that attention is reward enough for an inspiring subject, and that the accumulated wealth of a few, is a boon for the masses.
Trickle Down — A New Vertical Sovereignty is an artwork by Helen Knowles. The work is produced by FutureEverything with additional support from the Whitworth, The University of Manchester, Arebyte Gallery and FACT.
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.
