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Contemporary art, capitalization and the blockchain: On the autonomy and automation of art's value

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Laura Lotti
Laura Lotti*
Affiliation:
UNSW Australia, Australia
*
Corresponding author: Laura Lotti, School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Australia, Sydney NSW 2052, Australia. Email: l.lotti@unsw.edu.au
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Abstract

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This article addresses contemporary art as a means to investigate how, and to what extent, financial logic impacts upon the socio-cultural sphere. Its contribution is twofold: on the one hand, the article shows that contemporary art's valuation practices increasingly reflect the logic of capitalization; on the other hand, it assesses the emancipatory potential of blockchain technology for the cultural sphere. In relation to the latter I argue that, in spite of the technological novelty of blockchain-based art projects, these nonetheless fail to challenge a received logic of finance. This exposes the limitations to technological determinism as a means of countering financial power in the socio-cultural sphere, and points to new problems for art's valuation methods in relation to the liquid logic of algorithmic finance.

Keywords

Contemporary artvaluationcapitalizationcomputationblockchain
Type
Article
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 2 , Issue 2: Art and finance , 2016 , pp. 96 - 110
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2016 The Author(s)

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