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Almost in the middle of "The Art of Blockchains", the star-studded half-day conference hosted by billionaire collector, gallery owner and entrepreneur Adam Lindemann to explore the embarrassing novel of the art world with blockchain technology, the director of the New Museum Lisa Phillips succinctly summarized the fundamental tension that haunts the shared space. "We have heard a lot about value," he said, "but not much on it values".
Phillips was referring only to the two discussions that preceded his panel in the program of the day. But his observation has gone through a bit of the environmental hype and the core of the main question that needs to be addressed if this technology, or any other one, can ever produce a transforming future for the market. art.
After one of these five hours, occasionally revealing, sometimes exasperating and often surreal, the conference deserves credit to bring out truly foundational questions about the relationship between art and innovation, especially among a list of world-class guests. 39. art that would otherwise rarely engage in these specific terms. He has joined, among others, the curator of Phillips and the Museum of Modern Art Stuart Comer with guests such as Peace vice president Adam Sheffer and director of the Armory Show, Nicole Berry.
Only those who have registered the dramatic implications of the implications, let alone left and are willing to intervene because of them, remain the most relevant questions.
The director of the new museum Lisa Phillips and Adam Lindemann.
Viewfinder
To say that blockchain was a popular topic in the art world this year would be a ludicrous euphemism, on the contrary, this was not even the only big blockchain confab of the week.
Eventbrite lists a "Blockchain World Conference" of a whole week, not particularly focused on art but "strategically linked to the Miami based art festival that will attract people of high value from all over the world." Elsewhere, for a ticket price listed as between $ 125 and $ 1075, you could have gone to a "networking event for investors and entrepreneurs" called "Bitcoin Mansion" in the Design District. And tomorrow, at the Nikki Beach Club, the umpteenth event, dubbed "Art Decentralized", promises a keynote from the artist known only as VESA.
"The Art of Blockchains" was by far the most respectable of these events, characterized by an unexpected diversity of participants, and was organized by Lindemann, who has been studying technology for over a year, and is an investor in several initiatives blockchain, including Artblx, who organized the conference.
With a handful of welcome exceptions, the most constant and annoying problem that haunts the various conversations in "The Art of Blockchains" had little to do with the specific limits or capabilities of the technology itself. For my eyes and ears, it was actually the drastic measure in which, even for very intelligent people, personal incentives can often harden a vision of the world and limit the imagination.
This is certainly not an exclusive problem for those of us (myself included) who attended the conference. The author Chuck Klosterman wrote a mischievous book and opened to the eyes on this phenomenon entitled But what if we're wrong?: We think of the present as if it were the past. In it, it turns readers through multiple exercises of thought starting from the assumption that what is obvious in retrospect is often unfathomable in the moment – and vice versa.
That very human fallacy tends to be particularly powerful within closed niche groups. Just think of the aggressive (and encouraging) re-evaluation of modern and post-war art that now elevates the revolutionary contribution of women, people of color and non-Westerners. If we all agree that this revision has been waiting for so long, why did not our predecessors understand it at the time? More inconvenient, what could happen at this time that we ourselves can not begin to process?
Adam Lindemann and Square co-founder Jim McKelvey during a "chat on fire". Photo credit: Madison McGaw / BFA.com.
I raise this problem because many of the conference speakers seemed almost militantly unaware of the prospect that other art lovers and potential art lovers – the countless thousands of people whose interactions with art, they claim, will be transformed by blockchains – they could have radically different wishes and need those that would satisfy their business plans. This was the stumbling block that Lisa Phillips targeted with her line on value over values.
His commentary seemed to be motivated by the first panel of the day, in which legitimately progressive ideas that built communities within a digital municipality, significantly expanding the public for art, finding sustainable ways to finance traditionally market-resistant media , the supposed fascination of "participating in art" emerged through fractional ownership and the tokenisation of great works to "free liquidity" bottled within them, as if we were discussing the need to clash shale formations during a scene dell & # 39; OPEC. Although many large checks will change hands during Miami Art Week, far more people are here to see art and go to art-related parties than to actually buy art, making the rhetorical domain of artistic experiences based on day-to-day transactions seem particularly dissonant with the realities on the ground.
Similarly, orator after speaker invoked the idea that the blockchain was already a "disruptive technology" and that its basic reform of the art trade was "inevitable", the most revered term in the techno- logical dialect. capitalist of Silicon Valley. Yet what the blockchain has achieved to this day to deserve oily oils remains mysterious to the average citizen, in addition to flooding their daily experience of breathless evangelization on how blockchain and cryptocurrencies will change their lives. So far, it is less a triumph of technology than of tautology.
A "physical Bitcoin" (which is a kind of expedient, but exists). Photo by Thomas Trutschel / Photothek via Getty Images.
Alternative history
Blockchain's defenders would say I'm asking for results too soon. But how long do we have to wait? While the popular genesis of cryptocultura was the appearance of Satoshi Nakomoto's 2008 Bitcoin white paper, NYU professor Amy Whitaker pointed out throughout the day that a document detailing the underlying technology had actually been published by scientists Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta until 1991. In short, we had the blockchain project for 27 years, and at the moment the event that has come farther in the zeitgeist is Bitcoin, a currency that promises decentralization, but gave a state of affairs where the 97% of all According to a Credit Suisse report at the beginning of this year, the value of bitcoin is only contained in four percent of Bitcoin portfolio addresses.
Of course, the art industry has just begun with the blockchain in recent years – late as usual, when it comes to technology – and our industry could be particularly suited to capitalizing on this technology through potential use cases. as securities registers with timestamps and smart contracts. But there was a small and precious discussion in "The Art of Blockchains" about the possibility that the blockchain could be simply an imperfect technology, a perspective that would explain why its hype began to die out in the business world before adopting months ago, and a recent study of 43 blockchain-based companies "found no documentation or evidence of the results that the blockchain should have achieved," according to USAID colleague John Burg and colleagues.
To his credit, Nanne Dekking of the blockchain title register Artory spoke to this uncomfortable truth in the first panel of the day, offering to know "only one company with a successful blockchain use case" to date: the colossus Maersk , which uses technology to verify its supply chain. However, his co-supervisor, Emmanuel Aidoo, titled "Head of Distributed Ledger Technology," of Credit Suisse immediately made fun of himself by claiming to personally manage 17 blockchain projects. However, he could not tell us anything about them, because, in his words, "we are not public in everything we do".
Likewise, in a completely surreal "chat on fire" with Lindemann, Square co-founder Jim McKelvey began by asking if the room would obey Chatham House Rule by anonymizing his statements if we had written or published about them. The room said "no" and here we are.
This strange veneer and dagger veneer by Aidoo and McKelvey strangely recalled the results of the aforementioned blockchain 0-for-43 study, in which its authors claimed they were not able to get answers through direct requests to any of the looked in "Despite all the clamor about how the blockchain will bring unprecedented transparency to processes and operations in low-trust environments, the sector itself is opaque." The irony is thicker than the air before a thunderstorm in South Beach.
Adam Lindemann with Kenny Scharf in front of the live painting of Scharf made during lunch Art of Blockchains.
PHOTO CREDIT: Madison McGaw / BFA.com.
Of pyromaniacs and firemen
Such reflections lead us to a crucial possibility raised by Whitaker: that too many people in the art-and-blockchain space expect technological innovation to solve fundamentally human problems. Even the most elegant software can not change anything if the people involved do not want the change to happen.
Change requires that extraordinary individuals (and extraordinarily rare) engage in something that actively works against their own incentives for the greater good. To borrow a metaphor by Anand Giridharadas, whose book The winners take everything questions the surprisingly widespread belief that we can and should trust the plutocrats (many of them rich in Big Tech) to "change the world" for the better when they are the people who benefit so disproportionately from the way the world works now, this hypothesis base is erroneous how to rely on pyromaniacs to be firefighters.
However, that particular formulation seems to me too harsh here. The number of "The Art of Blockchains" was less mischievous than myopia. People with careers in art or in technology careers only tend to see what they have been trained to see. But regardless of the difference in animating force, the results at the conference were the same as the Giridharadas formulation: as always, people who offered the most disruptive and transformative ideas about the potential of blockchain were almost invariably the ones with the least power to implement them.
Even the notions of power came to the fore through the artist and technical secretary of the Serpentine Galleries, Ben Vickers. In the final panel of the day (next to Whitaker), he broke from previous presenters emphasizing the need to understand the real technological details of the blockchain. Why? Because the details reveal crucial information about those who hold otherwise invisible power in a supposedly decentralized system. (For more details, just take a deeper look at the fractional property based on blockchain.)
On the contrary, the moderator of the opening panel has fortunately circumvented the details of the technology once the majority of members of the public raised their hands to confirm that they have already heard of blockchain. And in his aforementioned "conversation with the fireplace" with Lindemann, McKelvey has repeatedly hammered out the idea that the technological details would simply put everyone to sleep. (What really woke me up was McKelvey's return line that an artist is "someone who sells something no one else needs", en route to a monologue that supports the importance of the blockchain to the world of 39; art through his practice as a blown glass artist.)
Artblx co-founder and CEO Dan Long, Pace president and CEO, Marc Glimcher, moderator Arthur Falls, and Emmanuel Aidoo of Credit Suisse. Photo credit: Madison McGaw / BFA.com.
The light at the end of the chain?
However, there were pleasant surprises. First of all the president and CEO of Pace, Marc Glimcher, who did something incredibly rare for a retailer in his position: to admit that the traditional art market had failed the progressive artists in the past. He expressed this idea in the context of performance art, which he said has basically made painting irrelevant in the 70s, until the inability of traders to find a sustainable economic model for its supporters has emptied the medium from inside.
However, Glimcher went further by trumpeting the proof of concept for an alternative model in the recent history of Peace. He claimed that the gallery sold a million timed tickets, at $ 20 each, during the 14-month show of the Japanese team of the Lab team at the pop-up space in Menlo Park (recently closed). He also estimated that only about 10% of teamLab's revenues came from the sale of installations, while the other 90% came from ticket sales.
This triumph and other evidence of the presence of Pace & # 39; s Bay Area (which continues through a permanent Palo Alto space) led Glimcher to declare to the public: "We will modify our model, or" -devices to the next generation- "going do it for us. "
Whitaker, the NYU professor, mentioned a similar concept during the final panel of the day. There, he raised the possibility that the real disruptive technology inside the block diagram of art-and-block Venn was not the technology itself, but rather the opportunity to galvanize "artists who act as a whole organized "to guarantee their rights. He expressed optimism regarding this union, deriving from his belief that people are "inherently generous" – albeit at the risk of self-admitting ingenuity.
An image that spoke 1000 words
Yet, exacerbating this moment of hope at the end of the conference was an incident that served, in my mind, as the most indelible view of the day.
Previously, during a lunch sitting inside the congress center, spray master Kenny Scharf had created a live painting on a surface made up of 100 small canvases. The concept, as Lindemann had explained to Bloomberg before the event, was "for each participant to obtain a piece" as "a metaphor for blockchain: it is meant to be shared".
But that's not how things went.
Shortly after Scharf completed his work, without any announcement, a group of participants rushed to the painting and began to tear small canvases from the matrix itself. Others in the room quickly abandoned their dishes to take charge of the melee. The rest of us stared at our former tablemates with awe, moments so refined and docile before, which created a frenzy of 20 deep pores for the remaining unclaimed property packages. Among them, a tall, bearded man with a mane similar to a Samson roaring in the crowd, holding three canvases on his chest like battle trophies, his head thrown back in laughter.
Although there were some gift bags with Scharf work pieces waiting at the check-in table outside the conference room as we returned to the afternoon sessions, the symbolic painting was not evenly distributed at the end. The most aggressive and opportunist has taken away too much of the gains.
As metaphors for the blockchain, let me guess that was not what Lindemann hoped. If the highest ranks of the art world are willing to face the dysfunction and personal interest revealed, then "The Art of Blockchains" could still be a historical moment regardless of the fate of the underlying technology. But as with so much else in the blockchain space, this is a colossal "if".
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