To a global digital culture

Glob­al­iz­a­tion and digit­iz­a­tion go hand in hand. And both are the defin­ing factors of this generation.

How­ever, in con­ven­tion­al struc­tures, the art mar­ket is a west­ern thing. New tech­no­lo­gies allow lower­ing the threshold of entry for many usu­ally excluded from cul­tur­al dis­tri­bu­tion and income generation.

On NFT mar­ket­places, we see that mostly young artists from areas typ­ic­ally con­sidered to be peri­phery are part of a glob­al dis­course. It is inter­est­ing that they hon­our the pos­sib­il­ity of stay­ing anonym­ous. And some man­aged to pay off their debts, earn­ing some $10.000 in cryptocurrency.

Cred­its

3 responses to “To a global digital culture”

  1. Har­ald, this is a very com­plex and ambigu­ous situ­ation. In my opin­ion, act­ive inter­ven­tion by auc­tions like Christie’s, has a very strong influ­ence on the pri­cing of this phe­nom­en­ally fast-grow­ing mar­ket, and often col­lec­tions of dilet­tante works are ranked unfairly at both price and hype after suc­cess­ful sales. There is a re-eval­u­ation of the value of visu­al art, and there is a danger that many tal­en­ted artists in pur­suit of money are being con­ver­ted into man­u­fac­tur­ers of the pos­sible Crypto Punks and Crypto Apes instead of cre­at­ing real works of art.

    • Thank you for your post. I believe you are right, hype caused by big play­ers can lead to a main­stream­ing towards simple but suc­cess­ful visu­al cul­ture that adapts to the struc­tures of short-term suc­cess. But it could also be a phe­nomen­on of the first wave and in the long run, qual­ity will be anoth­er path. Maybe we can view it in par­al­lels to his­tory: With the rise of cheap prints, great paint­ings were still in demand–but in anoth­er niche.
      In any case, we can agree that the art world is chan­ging rap­idly and those, who cre­ate col­lect­ively nego­ti­ate the way forward.

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