Reports from the Edge of Art and the Blockchain #4

By Ruth Catlow

“We need to collapse the space between artists and audiences” — Art xN Alliance

What stories are there about Art and artworlds? How have network cultures changed these stories? What has this got to do with blockchains? And why does it matter?

When Ernst Gombrich wrote The Story of Art in 1950, long before the Internet and machine learning, Art was what artists did to demonstrate skill (and apparently women weren’t artists). Thirty-one years later, sexual politics in modern culture became the story, as Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock re-inserted female artists into the cannon with Old Mistresses; Women, Art and Ideology.

Since the late 80s and the arrival of the Internet, Money has been the charismatic star of an artworld story of auctions, biennales and fairs. We can tell this as a true horror story in which Art is reduced to the status of fuel for an exotic (now ‘AI’ enhanced) financial machinery operated by and for an increasingly tiny group of people. Meanwhile on the ground, the value of Art to most people is called into question, and most artists can barely survive.

What has this got to do with blockchains? Well, to deliver on their social and cultural promise, both blockchain and art worlds must engage a greater variety of people, and for that they need better stories.

Blockchain artworld stories still remain a little dull for most people. Rare digital collectibles like CryptoPunks/Kitties have gained limited traction. Resale rights for artists and automated proof of authorship and ownership are important technical advances for artworld business as usual, but the players remain the same. And the tale of decentralised marketplaces for digital art is all setting and no character. Who are we rooting for here?

Charlotte Frost’s recent book Art Criticism Online describes the proliferation of forms and styles of art criticism that grew up alongside artistic practices since the Internet. This explosion in the number and variety of people responding to Art online is potentially transformative if accompanied by new ways to help it to thrive.

For Peter Holsgrove, the founder of Art x N Alliance (AxNA) new artworld narratives will be the key to the formation of the decentralised artworld economies we need. At the recent DAOWO Art and Blockchain Knowledge Sharing Summit in London he argued that dominant artworld narratives keep artists and audiences apart.

For AxNA developer, Owen Barnes the social media behemoths are the villains to be vanquished. “Until we stop creating things out of our imaginations and then giving that thing away to a company that then monetises it and locks it into their platform we are never going to progress to the next era of technology which looks radically different.”

We need new approaches for more social artforms whose value derives from the dynamic data relationships of those involved. This is why ‘making digital files scarce again’ is not enough to make a new artworld economy.

As Barnes says people “need to own their own relationships and their own data” and he proposes that “the neutral platform of the blockchain” is the way to achieve this, approaching something like an Art data commons.

The AxNA conversation prompts a vision in which a thousand new artworlds bloom, in which narratives are created and built by communities of artists and audiences* who are able to experiment with ways of resourcing, sustaining and sharing creativity because they own their relationships and their data, rather than being locked into private platforms.

Now that’s a story I want to hear!

*We need new words for audiences.