What ”artworld”? wbu NFTs?
What follows is a short description of this unusual field of activity we call ”the artworld” & what its altogether about.
author’s sculpture titled ’Insert Your Self’ (2018) from the series ’Spaces’
The people who spend exorbitant amounts of money on contemporary art are part of a special subculture. It is a relatively small, closed circle of actors in the business of creating, evaluating, buying & selling cultural artefacts of the highest echelon. Being exclusive in many ways, this subculture has developed social norms, procedures & value systems that aren’t familiar to most of us.
As a result of its exclusivity, there exists a separation of everyday life and the artwold - that’s also why most people have never heard of George Condo, but his works still fetch millions of dollars. If you think that sounds out-of-reach, you are more right than you know because even if you had millions of dollars, you couldn’t buy a Condo from a gallery. They simply won’t sell it to you. To even begin to seriously discuss someday maybe buying one, they’d want to know who you are, what you do, what your tax bracket is, who your friends are & where you like to spend your summers?
Sounds absurd, but this is pretty much your only way of entering the artworld. Most likely even after Condo’s gallery has ”vetted” you to be a legitimate buyer & art appreciator instead of some flipper, you will still not be able to buy an artwork by the artist. No - they are reserved for long-time collectors of the gallery, so you have to perform ”patronage of the arts” by buying other less famous artists on the gallery’s roster and go to dinners or charity galas with ”the right people” in order to get a chance at buying a Condo.
Sounds ludacris. I can imagine this feels so arbitrary and pretentious to the vast majority of people in this world.
You’ve sold your startup company and you have the money to buy a top-notch painting, but you can’t. At this point you have to either swallow the artworld pill and start participating in this subculture… OR admit that you can’t own a Condo (unless ofcourse you are willing to pay multiple times the retail price at an auction).
All of this to participate in what seems like a distorted reality based on perceived value of fundamentally useless objects. It is collective hallusination. A very good one and seemingly quite sincere and harmless, but one nevertheless.
Now compare this collective hallusination to NFTs. I know - they seem to be a bunch of keyboard monkeys trading straight up pixels. It looks REALLY stupid, but so does this artworld mess: some of those objects aren’t even pictures, but blank canvases or mere rocks on the floor and they fetch millions too!
NFTs are another subculture with its own initiation rites and arbitrary-sounding value systems. Its a collective hallusination of willing participants seeking the most exclusive objects possible. It happens online amongst millenials dealing with digital objects & the other happens offline amongst boomers dealing with physical objects.
Ultimately they both come down to prestige: social & cultural validation, belongingness & identification of oneself through signs. Things that are so elusive, that putting a price on them is only ever a subjective approximation of their value and thus no price is out-of-question.