Can Artists Beat a Rigged Game : part 1

The art market is an immense beast with a wide range of layers spanning from young aspiring artists to the 'living legends', from enthusiastic souls to big investors, from eager networkers to socially awkward professionals, from prices as low as 2 digits (yes, it happens) to 6 digits and beyond. This is why criticizing the art market without targeting specific layers and dynamics can be incredibly entertaining but also harmless.

The latest episode of 'The Art Angle' podcast addressed one of those important dynamics, one that often goes under the radar:

The issue of artist's royalties. How can the artworld normalize and facilitate future returns to artists after a piece has been sold.

Listening to the podcast led me to sit and write this short text with my own thoughts on this matter. Artist's royalties are a win-win situation as it benefits both artists and collectors. From an investment perspective acquiring an artwork is really different from acquiring a house (for argument's sake, let's say the hypothetical house was built by the person who is selling it). Future returns over the artwork are significantly tied to the future development of that artist's career; therefore, to the future energy that the artist puts into continuing with her artistic growth. Financial incentives in the form of revenue (that derives from royalties) could facilitate that growth. On the other hand, the future price of a commodity like a house is not linked to the future performance of the person who built it. That is the simple reason why artist's royalties are both ethical and desirable for all the participants in the system.

The possibility of using 'smart contracts' linked to off-chain artworks (i.e. an oil painting on canvas, a performance documented in 35mm film, etc.) was also addressed in the podcast (as you can tell I definitely recommend listening to it). This is a possibility that, along many other people, I have been looking into as well. Evidently this could be a perfect use-case for #blockchain technology though the implementation needs to be simplified and secured, and the idea behind smart certificates of authenticity (linked to an off-chain artwork) needs to be portrayed on its own, differentiated from its nft cousin (remember, many people are rightfully put off by highly speculative digital assets). This is because in the minds of many, who are #web3 averse or are not tech-savvy, this kind of smart contracts and nfts may feel the same.

While it is clear that these are exciting times to build bridges between the virtual and the physical worlds (aka, nfts linked to physical entities), it would be healthy to also give blockchain (applied to the artworld) a chance to improve the traditional system in addition to (and differentiated from) what nfts offer.

Implementing this sort of smart contracts is really important for the emergence of better transparency (securing provenance) and of a more just system (where royalties are paid to creators). However, this is only the tip of the mountain:

The real deal happens once blockchain tech becomes more user friendly and accessible (by lowering its knowledge threshold) then it will be used for something wonderful: a future artworld in which collective action takes more diverse forms, and the available resources are more horizontally distributed among the participants in the system. I'm speaking here about #DAOs as replacements for many of the nodes (galleries, institutions, etc.) in our current system.

To be further discussed.

A text by Oscar Santillán

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#artworld #royalties #nfts #artangle #artnet #contemporaryart #frieze #artfair #artfairs #artmarket #collector