This paper introduces The Visual Ledger, a diagnostic analysis of European art history between 1849 and 1991 that treats painting as an archival instrument registering the progressive evacuation of ontological weight from the human figure. Using a diagnostic history methodology, the article argues that painters detected and documented shifts in how presence, consequence, and embodiment are organised decades before these transformations consolidated institutionally. Beginning with the material density of Realism in Courbet and Repin, the analysis traces a directional transformation through Impressionism’s optical dissolution, Pointillism’s cognitive fragmentation, Art Nouveau’s decorative masking, Malevich’s honest void, and Pop Art’s operationalisation of abstraction as governance. The AIDS crisis functions as a late twentieth-century visibility stress test, exposing the limits of surface-based legibility when confronted with suffering resistant to procedural categorisation. The paper demonstrates that visual archives independently converge with literary and administrative records, showing that populations currently collapsing under procedural abstraction are experiencing the settlement of a transformation painters registered when evacuation began. This contribution is conceptual and diagnostic rather than empirical. It forms one component of the broader Equilibrium Ledger framework, which examines how institutions generate and distribute cognitive costs, and how procedural abstraction renders embodied complexity administratively legible while humanly inaccessible.
This context informs the conversations with artists and creative practitioners in this book.Often, their work with and around Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) emerges from these very concerns.Does that mean that DAOs are capable of solving the sociopolitical issues of precarity, cuts, and censorship?No. 'Free blockchain money' does not exist.DAOs do not 'magically' make more funding appear, least of all structurally so.And DAOs do not allow artists and cultural practitioners to leave behind their national contexts of austerity and repression and exchange them for some virtual utopia.However, this does not mean that engaging with DAOs is pointless in the face of these circumstances and limitations.In this publication, I ask practitioners to share their experiences, focussing specifically on the definition of new forms of agency in cultural decision-making, explorations of shared ownership in arts and culture amid widespread logics of private property and extractivism, and the making of prefigurative claims on futures envisioned from the bottom up.None of these practices will be able to replace the structures of state funding or cancel oppressive concentrations of power any time soon, but they do open up space to manoeuvre and create tactical interventions, to find each other and build solidarity, and to regain a sense of futurity together.In other words, to reimagine, reclaim, and restructure shared socio-technical futures.The six people that I interviewed represent key voices in the countercultural and artistic DAO space.Penny Rafferty is a cofounder of Black Swan -a DAO that pursued horizontal and decentralised approaches to art-making -and she pushes DAO discourse into new directions with critical and imaginative work.Erik Bordeleau is a co-founder of The Sphere -a DAO that explores new ecologies of funding to develop a regenerative commons for the performing arts -and contributes boundarypushing philosophical and media theoretical perspectives to DAO thought.Ruth Catlow developed CultureStake -a voting system for decentralised cultural decision-making that uses quadratic voting on the blockchain -and has been a central Repression of Palestinian Culture and soidarity: Independence as Resistance,' Reset! 8
La notorietà degli NFT (non-fungible tokens) sta vivendo nell’ultimo tempo una inflessione negativa, non solo tra il pubblico specializzato ma anche fra i meno esperti, che hanno sentito parlare di queste strane “opere d’arte digitali crittografate” nel 2020, quando questo fenomeno era nella sua fase di massima ascesa. L’applicazione di questa tecnologia, resa celebre dalla diffusione (questa sì, in evidente ripresa) delle criptovalute, al mondo dell’arte digitale e del mercato che intorno a questa si è generato, risente ora delle conseguenze di questa diffusa sfiducia verso l’“arte su blockchain”. Insomma, i celebri cripto-gattini non sembrano essersela mai passata così male come ora. È forse giunto dunque il momento di una valutazione del fenomeno NFT che guardi oltre ai sensazionalismi del mercato come anche alle repentine disillusioni. In questo, gli strumenti dell’Estetica ci sembrano i più adatti a uno scopo certo pretenzioso ma necessario, considerando soprattutto che gli NFT hanno generato, che lo si voglia riconoscere o meno, una piccola rivoluzione nel mercato dell’arte. Di questo parliamo nel nostro contributo “NFT: tra esperienza estetica e nuovi mercati dell’arte”, recentemente apparso sul volume della Milano University Press a cura di Allegra Canepa Il mercato dei non fungible tokens tra arte, moda e gamification. Il contributo raccoglie prospettive diverse – appunto estetiche, ma anche sociologiche, economiche, tecnologiche, etc. – sul mondo cripto.
Dijitalleşme süreci, her disiplinde kendi teknolojik dönüşümünü oluşturmaktadır. Sanatın dönüşüm sürecinde birtakım problemler ortaya çıkmış ve bu süreçte ortaya çıkan “Taklidi Mümkün Olmayan Jeton” Non-Fungible-Token (NFT) sanat alanında; eserlerin dijital olarak sertifikalanması, eser sahipliğini sunması ve satış sürecinin takibi vb. birçok ihtiyaca çözüm niteliği olarak görülmektedir. Nitekim NFT teknolojisi, sanattan bağımsız kullanımından kaynaklı, insanlarda kavram çatışmasına, sanatçılarda fikir ayrılıklarına sebep olurken aynı zamanda direnç unsurları oluşturmuştur. Teknolojik determinizm bakış açısıyla ele alınan bu çalışma, NFT teknolojisi özelinde aura ve direnç unsurlarını çözümlemektedir. Çalışma grubu, NFT tabanlı eser üreten sanatçılarla sınırlandırılmıştır. Sanatçılarının direnç ve auraya yönelik tutumlarına ilişkin veriler, çevrimiçi anket çalışması aracılığıyla toplanmış olup istatistiki analiz programıyla analiz edilmiştir. Veriler, araştırma grubuna uygulanan yarı-yapılandırılmış derinlemesine görüşmeler ile desteklenmiştir. Çalışmada nicel ve nitel araştırma yönteminin birlikte kullanıldığı karma araştırma yöntemi seçilmiştir. Karma yöntemin sınıflandırılması “Açıklayıcı”, düzeyi “Tamamen”, zaman yönelimi “Sıralı”, vurgu yaklaşımı “Eşit statüde” belirlenmiştir. Soruların kuramsal temeli Walter Benjamin’in “Sanatın Aurası” kavramından oluşturulurken çalışmada “NFT teknolojisiyle inşa edilen dijital sanatın aurası, sanatı toplumdan uzaklaştırmaktadır” hipotezi araştırılmıştır. Analizler sonucunda, sanatçılar tarafından NFT tabanlı eserlerde aura oluşumunun ve karşılaşılan direnç unsurlarından dolayı NFT teknolojisinden uzaklaşmama eğiliminin desteklendiği saptanmıştır. Çalışmada sanatın dönüşüm sürecinde ihtiyaca çözüm olarak görülen bir aracın, sanatı dönüştürüp dönüştürmediği, direnç ve sanatçı ilişkisi, gelecek ön görüleri tespit edilmiş olup “Siber Aura” kavramı ortaya atılmıştır. Veriler, sanatın teknolojik yeniliklerde aynı veya benzer sorunlar yaşamamasına, sanatçıların dijitalleşme sürecindeki sanata bakış açılarına dikkat çekme ve yeni kavramların literatüre eklenmesi amacı taşımaktadır.
On 8 September 2022, the American artist Frank Stella launched a series of twenty-two digital art works minted as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in collaboration with Arsnl, the in-house platform by the Artist Rights Society (ARS). Titled Geometries, each “package,” included the NFT that would affirm ownership and the corresponding geometric model designed by Stella in JPG (image), MP4 (video), SLS (3D printing), GLB (virtual reality and model manipulation), and USDZ (augmented reality). This range of digital formats alludes to two of Stella’s innovations in this space: the license to remix and manipulate his models, and the ability to 3D print Geometries at any color, scale, and material. Taking Stella’s foray into the NFT-space as a starting point, my article focuses on an emergent trend by artists engaging with Web3: the effort to bridge the physical and the digital by giving tangible form to NFT artworks and what this suggests for the future of digital materiality. The paper at its core seeks to examine the relationship between the physical referents to NFTs at the very moment when new media returns to historical forms.
My thesis examines crypto art from several different vantage points. This is a budding artistic phenomenon which, can be broadly defined as art that takes place on the blockchain (also called a distributed digital ledger). Investigating this movement can aid in illuminating alternative forms of contemporary artistic practice, the direction of the blockchain, and a better understanding of cryptocurrency. Crypto art facilitates an efficient form of economic value creation for both artists and collectors, enabled by the blockchain’s capacities around tracing provenance and authenticity as well as implementing mechanisms to ensure artists receive compensation at the point of sale and resale. These outcomes would not have been possible in a pre-blockchain world. However, many of the approaches and philosophies are shared between the makers and functions of crypto art and conceptual art. Several aspects of blockchain technology are “new,” but the problems and questions that crypto art addresses, including its association with larger financial forces, have tremendous art historical precedent. Much of the modern art system is even built upon these connections, and paralleling this movement to conceptual art can help expose these affiliations. Looking at blockchain through the legacy of conceptual art also demonstrates the need for this technology and its capabilities, most notably, the built-in payment structure for artists. With this in mind, the central questions in my thesis are: how has crypto art challenged the relationship to authorship, ownership, dematerialization and distribution that were fundamental to conceptual art? And what relevance does this have for blockchain technology today? In attempting to address these questions, this paper will argue that crypto art reveals and critiques the framework of the art market. I will focus on Rare Pepes (2016-present) for my primary case study but will also survey other crypto art works to support my argument. The majority of my research engages directly with crypto art. For supplementary material, I have relied upon the work of Jason Bailey and Hito Steyerl as well as Oliver Roeder. I will also employ the writings of Lucy Lippard, Benjamin Buchloh and Joseph Kosuth to think through the theoretical side of conceptual art.
On February 25, 2011, the fashion luxury company Christian Dior suspended John Galliano, who had been its creative director since 1996, after his arrest over making anti-Semitic remarks at a Paris bar. Quickly following his suspension, a video from December 2010 was distributed showing Galliano hurling anti-Semitic invectives at several bar patrons. On March 1, 2011, Dior fired Galliano. At stake in the considerable interest and speculations regarding who takes over at Dior is control of a €24.6B business empire and access to a historic couturier’s archive. In this sense, its designer will influence the label’s "books" both financial and what will be stored in its physical repository as part of the brand’s creative and artistic repertoire. Despite fashion’s apparent ubiquity, the anticipation surrounding who takes over at Dior is proof that despite fashion’s professed democratization, there still exists a fashion hierarchy with Dior occupying its upper echelon. Since Galliano’s dismissal, fashion insiders have moved from breathlessly feverish in their speculations to desperately calling out for relief in the face of an unexpectedly drawn-out waiting game that is now over a year old and otherwise an eternity in fashion’s hyper accelerated production cycle. To purposely counter fashion’s accelerated internal clock, the purpose of this commentary is to keep fashion in a reflective state rather than a reflexive stance and uses fashion on film, and specifically Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (1994), to give cultural and historical context to all the online speculation and chatter. Altman’s film is the fractal, or the repeating pattern, in a dramatized form, as well as the cultural archive against which to examine the entangled relations of the designer Marc J