ALEX ESTORICK, ART TECHNOLOGY AUTHOR, EDITOR & CURATOR

Music. Welcome, everybody, to another edition of the Art Business Podcast.

My name is David Bellingham. I'm the Programme Director of the Master's Degree in Art Business at Sutherland Institute of Art in London. Like my guests, we're both pretty exhausted from last week's freeze week in London. We'll be talking more about that perhaps during the podcast. But anyway, I'd like to introduce you warmly to Alex Esturet, who describes himself as a writer, editor and curator, who develops inclusive approaches to new technologies. Alex is editor in chief at Right Click Save.

We'll talk about that more. It's arguably the world's leading digital art magazine. We, Alex, kindly gave us a copy for our digital library at the Institute. And those of you within the London art world will also perhaps know Alex as the eponymous vice chair of the Estrick Collection of Modern Art in Islington. Which I've visited several times in the past with students. It's an amazing collection. So, Alex, I'm just going to start on the less formal note by asking you whether

you have a favourite city and why. I mean, it's hard to look past Paris right now, I think. And I say that just because I'm trying to keep my eyes on how the discourse around art and technology is going. And as we head into Art Basel, Paris this week, it's very noticeable how much investment has been made in driving that conversation, investing in events, NFT Paris, but also Basel. And I think a lot of the galleries there are doing really innovative things.

There's a wonderful gallery called Avant Galerie Vossin, which has been supporting the kind of marginal crypto artists for some time in the absence of much mainstream interest. And I wrote an article for the FT about three years ago about London as a crypto art capital. And I think I have to say right now, I feel like London is rather lagging behind in that regard. So for various reasons and my current focus on digital art, I would say Paris is clinching it.

But New York is really far behind. And I think that's probably still the hottest place as far as galleries are concerned. Well, galleries exhibiting digital and selling digital art. I think what I would say right now, and this is something I've been writing a bit about, is how I feel we're heading towards a sort of naturally hybrid art world.

And I think a lot of mainstream contemporary galleries are coming to terms with the reality that a lot of their artists are using hybrid practices, transmedia practices. They might be using a digital platform in order to make sculpture that is then cast.

But historically that digital component has been masked or hidden you know perhaps because you know those galleries in that world is not so comfortable with sort of natively digital processes but uh yes so i think i think i'm trying to persuade leading galleries to embrace this more hybrid approach i think we're also in an age of hybrid collectors i think collectors both from the mainstream contemporary and also from the the crypto world are looking at each other and thinking,

I'm going to have to get on board here. I think that process of flirtation, a sort of uncomfortable one, is still ongoing. I participated in a talks program at Art Basel in Basel this year, which was all about building digital dialogues. I think that we're really at the start of a process of moving towards a hybrid space.

I i mean my instincts are that i totally agree with you in the same way as we moved into the hybrid you know communication space just like we're doing now you're not in the room here sometimes i record in person but you know it's made life a lot easier in many ways obviously.

So alice what about and that was quite interesting as well because you said nothing about the paris itself and the building so it shows that alice is that alice you're kind of living in that kind of digital space in many ways. Very much so, yes. I've done a number of articles on digital geography and this idea that, In the age of the internet, but also specifically in the context of the blockchain, there is a borderlessness that is genuine.

Of course, it's subject to regulatory regimes that restrict access to the internet and the digital divide, which privileges people in the global north, of course.

But a lot of the work we've done at Right Click Save has been to try and drive an inclusive conversation, not least because a lot of the leading crypto art and also generative art and digital art communities have been based in Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, and therefore it's been appropriate for us to cover a lot of ground and to regard the art world and the digital art world specifically as a digital geography, if you like.

So yes, clearly that is nevertheless dependent increasingly, I would say, on investment surrounding events, surrounding Miami, surrounding LA. It's hard not to feel that the digital art world, as I know it, is starting to reenact old systems or somehow assimilate itself into traditional patterns of flow.

Whether that's a good thing or not, of course, my priority at the magazine has tended to be to make sure that as that world becomes, dare I say, more centralized, it doesn't become less inclusive. Of course, I think we are heading towards a new star system. And of course, maybe all we can hope for is that that star system is more inclusive.

But of course, when we started the magazine, we were really trying to support an ecosystem that was more horizontal, more affordable, and also more inclusive. That has suffered in the context of a market downturn, both in the mainstream contemporary art world and in the digital art world. I'm hopeful that following the Bitcoin halving in April, we are going to see a rebound soon. When we do, I hope we're talking about a more inclusive space and not extractive and exclusionary.

It's fascinating actually to hear you discussing inclusivity in the digital world, because I think probably most listeners would probably assume there isn't kind of an issue with that. But we might even talk about that a little bit more later on. But I'm now going to pin you down. And it may be that you come up with a virtual building, but do you have any kind of favourite architecture, any favourite building?

Well, it's not something I talk a lot about, but I feel like this might be the moment to mention my grandparents' collection of modern Italian art, which is the Estric Collection in North London in Highbury. That's been open for 25 years now, over which time we've done. Temporary exhibitions that have tended to focus on artists from the 20th century.

We've also done a number of shows to do with contemporary artists reflecting on our collection, which is focused on the early days of futurism, as well as metaphysical painting from the early 20th century, and also other works that have a more classicizing bent, I would say, in the collection. I would say that sometimes when I'm taking groups around the museum, it's hard to find a guiding logic.

But I think if there is one, it has to do with something perhaps fundamental to the Italian psyche, which is this sort of interesting binary between modernism and classicism. And I think that that is something that is essential to the collection as we see it.

But also maybe to it also maybe explains why italy is is always at the forefront but always mindful of the past i mean a lot of the works in our collection maybe modigliani is the best example have a kind of etruscan preoccupation so that's just one example of of i think an interesting. Binary that that we find in in the italian psyche in in the museum and i it's no surprise to me that Italian curators and artists are also essential to the digital art conversation these days.

And so for me, although I didn't get into art history because of my family, the alliance of art and technology, or the coming together, or the kind of. The union of the two, however dysfunctional it might be, has become a preoccupation. Obviously, that was something that was fundamental to the sort of futurist vision and manifesto. I would say the caveat being that Marinetti's vision of futurism is almost the opposite of what I would like to celebrate now.

Indeed, if you take Blast, which was Wyndham Lewis's two-volume publication, which was one of the driving forces behind the English branch of futurism to some extent, which is known as vorticism. I have tried to build Right Click Save as a kind of progressive, inclusive alternative to that exciting but rather terrifying vision of modernity that both Wyndham Lewis but also Marinetti espoused back in the early 20th century. I guess most obviously I have a classical background.

Most obviously I suppose artists like De Chirico, who includes, I believe that he drew a lot of inspiration from the kind of baroque class sizing buildings in torino i remember sitting having coffees over looking some of those torino squares i love torino very underrated by the brits we used to take the students to artissima so we got to know it very well but but if you maybe we could perhaps i could ask you now then alice um this is a really difficult one obviously for the guests of this,

podcast to kind of try and pin them down but if you if you could only take i think we should allow you to choose one digital work, but also maybe a physical work.

Possibly it can be from the estuary collection, but what two works might you take if you could only take two to a desert island? Probably Coro's view of Florence from the Bobley Gardens would be one. I think because the theme seems to be gardens, I would go with Zankan's Garden Monoliths, which has been one of the most successful, celebrated generative art collections in recent years.

I would encourage listeners to investigate Michael Zankan because he's a wonderful artist and only one of a generation of creative coders who are interested in the not simulation of nature in code, but rather the re-imagination of natural morphologies through code.

And of course, as we are living in a sea of code these days, a kind of hybrid physical digital environment, I do think that artists working with code have an outsized potential to reshape the digital systems and in practice, the real world in which we live. So for that reason, I think maybe those two works might work together. It's very difficult, isn't it? Because, you know, it depends on mood and everything else. Totally.

I think both of those are probably representative of your, maybe, binary tastes that you have for the kind of, you know, romantic realist one might call Coro, I don't know, in the late 90s century. Is that painting from the Bobbly Gardens of Forenze? Is that in the Estric Collection? Absolutely not, no. Pardon my ignorance. I just wondered where, do you know where it is? It doesn't matter. We can look that up.

So what about music? Do you have a specific genre of music or are you a collector like many people these days? I was just looking that up. Did you find it? I would say eclectic in the extreme. I would, however, say that I have an unholy preoccupation with vaporwave and synthwave. It's only one of the many branches of music that I'm interested in.

But I think one of the things we've done at the magazine has been to shine a light on this kind of zeitgeist-y and tech nostalgia that I think a lot of people, certainly a lot of people who collect digital art right now, specifically things like CryptoPunks or other sort of, what I would say, almost realist works, works that shine a light on the meme economy in which we live. I do think that there's a prevailing tech nostalgia.

And of course, if CryptoPunks is the sort of visual instantiation of that, then I think Vaporwave or Synthwave music, which is often kind of, you know, it's sort of the, maybe you could say it's the backing music to, sorry, I'm just going to let that pass.

It's okay yeah i mean sorry i was just going to say to the age of this the the spin class i feel like if we're living in the age of the spin class then synthwave is a natural complement and i think as i ask answer your questions i think i think i'm trying to give you. What i'm i'm i'm hearing what i'm listening from the world not only as as music no i get it i get Got it.

Maybe you could say a little bit more about, before we come on to your education, when you started studying history of art, you did mention growing up and knowing the esteric collection of your grandparents. Can you remember any moment when you became aware that there was this curious thing called art, and an awareness that it was art as opposed to a pretty picture, if you like?

I mean, I always had art on the walls, I suppose, although unlike my father, who had historic works of art that are now in the Estric Collection on his own walls, in his dining room, in his home, for as long as I can remember, those works have been in a charity in the museum. So I don't have the same caliber of art on my walls, put it that way.

I also would say that one of the things that I have come to feel, having studied art history for a long time, but specifically Byzantine and medieval art, is the feeling that art in itself is a word and a kind of ideological infrastructure of its own. Indeed, one, I would say, that tends to perpetuate neocolonial and certainly neoliberal patterns.

And what I think is a pretty consistent preoccupation of mine is this idea that we're actually living in an age of images, mass image culture, in which, as Trevor Paglin wrote many years ago, more images are produced by machines for machines than by humans for humans or by humans for machines. The principle being that this domain of art that we seem so confident about is really a marginal volume of the images that are circulated as data in a digital context.

And while that may sound contrarian, I think the reality, if you go back to early medieval culture, go back pre-capitalism, is that it didn't matter whether the image was painted, whether it was sculpted, whether it was hammered in metal. What mattered was that it had received the imprint of the Holy Spirit in that case. Of course, in the Renaissance, we had altarpieces, which also were ways of, bridging this life and the next.

And I think to some extent, what the medieval world did was it financialized art by creating the doctrine of purgatory and by, in a sense, creating altarpieces as a vehicle for the obviation of sin. It financialized the spiritual economy, as it were. And so for me, whether we talk about art, whether we talk about hype, whether we talk about the spirit, the one constant through the history of images is this bringing together of matter and let's call it spirit.

You might also call it cultural value, somehow condensing cultural value into some material form. Of course, that may sound like a strange thing to say, But I think if you look at something like the NFT now, which does unite on the one hand, the monetary value of Ethereum cryptocurrency, for example, and on the other hand, the cultural value of a particular animation, GIF or JPEG or whatever media it is.

I think once again, we see that when we say art, in the most expanded sense, what we're really talking about is this alliance of form and spirit. I think it's a beautiful, if I may say, way of defining art. If I ever come to defining it in that way, I will certainly acknowledge this talk with you. I think you spoke a little bit about that in a lecture I witnessed at the Institute the other day. And we may even come back to that.

Quite coincidentally, actually, I do a lightning tour pair of lectures for my art business students, because most of them have studied history of art and nothing about the market. So I do a kind of history of art and its markets in two hours, starting with prehistory, indeed. And when I get to medieval and then Renaissance, I actually use similar rhetoric to yourself, actually, that, you know, artists, that's why we don't know the names.

We don't individualize artists for, you know, most of the medieval period, or you have to look hard to find them because art was to the glory of God. And then in the Renaissance, I talked about the increase in contracts that you find. You probably know Batsendall's book, where he talks about changing the language of contracts for Sandro Botticelli in the 15th century, where everything is just about the lapis lazuli and the gold. sorry, the lapis lazuli and the gold.

And then suddenly the contract starts specifying il pinello of the maestro, the brush of the master. And then artists begin to sign again, as they did in classical antiquity. And as in classical antiquity, culminating arguably with Michelangelo and his discourse with Pug Julius II, where he talks about.

You know, I showed the students that he charged I think he was paid something like 2,000 coins and only 25 of those were spent on the materials so that kind of fits in quite nicely with your definition I would say of what we mean by art but I totally agree with your notion as well that it's kind of become it is a construct and it is linked to kind of a high ideology which is why so many people feel uncomfortable still going into art galleries or indeed art fairs you know i noticed that freeze is

charging so much money and i was thinking well how can a how can like a an emerging art studio student afford to go into somewhere like freeze and see work by their contemporaries you know in reality so you know it's a long discussion that but maybe we could come to your so you graduated with a bachelor's degree in the history of art from the University of Cambridge.

I think you were studying between 2007 and 2010. And then that was followed by a distinction in... A master's degree in digital communication and media at London's Goldsmith College, where you graduated in 2021. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about your, were they different experiences studying, if I may say, traditional art history at Cambridge, and then the MA in digital communication and media at Goldsmiths? Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.

It's probably also worth just saying what I was doing for the decade in between i wasn't gonna didn't want to ask no no well i i it's important though i think i i was teaching art history at secondary schools for a lot of that time also writing for for contemporary art magazines breeze and flash art so i've had this slightly bipolar professional existence.

And of course as you know david teaching is the best form of learning so one of the things you If you're teaching art history, particularly at secondary schools, you have to know everything. It's not like being a historian where you're allowed a period.

I think that being forced to try and learn everything was what taught me that actually you need to have a very expanded understanding of images and how they fit within the social, political, and economic fabric of a particular society at a given moment. So that was very important. But of course, one of the, I think, of course, certain key questions arise.

And my master's was very helpful in allowing me to address certain questions around autonomy, this idea that art is this autonomous elite realm of culture separate from the gritty reality of market capitalism. Of course, I think it's fair to say that that separation is less and less feasible. I also wanted to address certain questions around decoloniality, around critical theory.

Working at Goldsmith is wonderful because it is kind of bastion of critical endeavor and also has a longstanding preoccupation with the relation of art to technology. I think the ways in which ideology gets imprinted in emerging technologies. One of the things that we've really tried to develop at the magazine is a critical approach to emerging technologies. We don't fetishize Web3. We don't fetishize blockchain, NFTs, and smart contracts.

We ask maybe what the potential progressive affordances of these technologies might be, But we also, I think, have been pretty clear on the potential negative consequences of any emerging technology, AI or otherwise. So for me, I think, you know, you could say studying art history was about studying art, studying media theory was about studying the application of ideas and ideologies differently.

To technology. For me, art and technology, I suppose, is the guiding thread in my life, and it's more important than ever. I think as technology becomes really a driver behind developments in both art and science, I think an understanding of emerging technology does allow one as great a reach to understand the world in general. I think I am preoccupied with understanding as much as I can.

Once again, to say, in a world which I think is less and less legible to the human, not least because so much information is being processed in a non-human context. That's something that's very difficult, I think, to get one's head around. I do sympathize with students right now who are trying to learn about the world at a moment where I think, to some extent, the world is closing itself off from us.

Yeah, no, I get that. I think it's quite a crisis, actually, that I do perceive in students who are now coming out of history of art, but also out of COVID and lockdown and the effects that that had on our understanding and use of the digital world, if you like. I've noticed, for example, that like last year's students, we have a work placement elective. So students have to choose two electives, and most of them are academic, if you like, but there's this work placement one.

And more and more people are choosing that. And I think it's because our students used to have the confidence to go into bricks and mortar galleries and make contacts and find internships and work experience in London for themselves. Well, that's my theory anyway. But I think a lot of this is to do with this kind of confusion of, am I now in the digital world or am I now in the in-person world?

I think they're interdependent. And unfortunately, as much as one might want to stay off social media, I think to be completely absent from social media is to absent oneself from the economy, visual and real. So, yes, I think it's a real bind for students right now who are trying to build careers, but who might feel uncomfortable about, you know, putting their life online. Absolutely. I mean, it's difficult, isn't it? Because part of me really does not want to be on social media.

But I do recognize it's a very useful form of communication as well. I mean, you know, putting pictures in about what one's been doing this last week in London, which was so exciting, the freeze week. But, you know, it's not meant to be kind of, I don't know how you feel about this, but I hope that what I post is not just blowing my own trumpet or sort of showing myself. So quite a lot of my students still, they follow me.

And then I look at their Instagram pictures and they're kind of basically on the beach, Saturday night's party or, you know, kind of a lifestyle, if you like. And it often doesn't include art. So I try to get them, obviously, just to create a more professional account, which I'm very happy to follow then. But it is interesting that people are using it for different things, their own personal social positioning, which itself, of course, can have terrible consequences, as we hear.

But also creating a platform for their professional selves. So anyway, talking about Frieze, we've just come out of the Frieze Art Fair weekend, and I believe you work for Frieze, for example, as a freelance writer. You're often commissioned by them. So maybe you could tell us more about what that entails. But also, Pats, what do you think about art fairs?

What do you think about the development of Frieze, for example, with the exponential proliferation of international art fairs since the new millennium, I would say, and Frieze itself, of course, being born in 2003. I just wonder what you think of art fairs and maybe the potential for digital art within art fairs. I mean, I think that they shape the ecosystem as a whole. And what has been striking is, particularly as the market for digital art has declined.

A lot of people in my world, so to speak, are courting Frieze, are courting Art Basel, are courting the blue chip galleries that hold the keys to those worlds. Because they do have this kind of outsized capacity to generate income for artists. I think there was a rather critical article written yesterday by Andrew Marr, who was looking at Freeze and I think feeling divorced from the art culture as it is today.

I sympathize with that viewpoint. It does feel like, as it were, the corporatization of the art world has come at the cost of the innocent eye, the innocent. Experience of art. On the other hand, I'm not sure the experience of art was ever that innocent in the first place. I do think, in a sense, we have to face up to the reality of a financialized art world.

One of the things that the NFT did, of course, was that it transparently financialized that world, which has often tried to obscure the relationship between art and money. You could go back to the 12th century and see the beginning of a relationship between images and money. I do think that we need to accept that that is a reality. I think it's something that actually potentially could be good because ultimately artists need to get paid.

I think the problem perhaps with these enormous hierarchical infrastructures is that artists tend not to reap the rewards of the labor that they are inputting. I think it is fair to say that one of the striking contrasts that's less talked about between the mainstream contemporary art world and the digital art world is that all of the digital art worlds, excepting a few pioneers, are alive.

I think that there is a difference between a kind of living and breathing ecosystem where the artists are driving the discourse almost themselves and a world which seeks to insert itself between the artists and their markets. And so, yes, I think that that is a sort of tricky point because I often find if I go to. The language used to talk about artists can be quite opaque.

That's not Fries or Art Basel's fault. Both of them try very hard, I think, to engineer a values-based or an ethically inscribed discourse.

But in practice, it's not their jobs. So I think what we tried to do at the magazine anyway was we wanted to turn the digital art world into a listening exercise so that instead of inserting ourselves as tastemakers, as gatekeepers between the artists and their markets, we wanted to let the artists' language dictate the terms by which their own work was evaluated. That is something that I don't think happens in the mainstream contemporary art world.

Because of course, if, you know, gallerists and gallery press releases specifically can sound clever, but in practice be meaningless, then it can uphold the purported pricelessness of the art.

I find that that has been my long-standing bet noire when it comes to contemporary art, this feeling that we're actually on a royal road to meaninglessness and that actually the language used to talk about contemporary art is the principal vehicle for meaning's evacuation rather than a means of magnifying or clarifying the potentially ethical or interesting or meaningful underpinnings of that art.

I don't know if that answers your question, But I do feel like Fries and Art Basel have both taken steps to enshrine a meaningful discourse, not least through Fries magazine. But I do feel like the art worlds that they help to uphold are not necessarily values driven. We're looking at a kind of neoliberal super state every time we travel to a new biennale. That's a really interesting way of looking at it.

Going around Fries London last week, I was quite surprised that most of the art I was seeing anyway was still traditional physical sculptures, paintings, drawings. I wasn't aware of much digital art.

I don't know if you have a comment on that. It was only Lawrence Leck and Yacolbe Satterwhite, so far as I can tell.

So no it was quite striking wasn't it that breeze london so far as i can remember had very little digital and very little screen based as well it just goes to show that ultimately i think if the contents of those fairs is depends on the collector's habits then clearly you know this big community of traditional art collectors is still uncomfortable with the idea of screen based art software art which of course has been going on since the 1960s so that obviously

from my perspective is is somewhat absurd but it does express that the reluctance of traditional collectors and the reluctance of mainstream galleries to take the risk or to take the leap of faith that i think is inevitable if we're to see the kind of hybrid reality manifest in the art world as well.

Yeah, I think there was more, I'm just trying to remember where it was, but there was a little bit more in the minor attractions, this strange, I don't know if you managed to get there, this luxury hotel in Fitzrovia, the mangrave that had art. It was so strange. There were kind of like sculptures in beds in luxury hotel rooms.

It's a boutique hotel anyway. But no, it is interesting, isn't it, the way the market and maybe one of the more commercial expressions of the international art market, the freeze, just doesn't seem to flirt anymore with the NFT digital screen, which at one point was becoming very attractive, I think. I certainly found it very interesting, and then it just seemed to go away, and we're back to the traditional commodities of sculptures and paintings, perhaps.

But so, Alex, yeah, so moving away from that for a while, you're a well-known writer and authority, as we've already seen on new technology and art, and you're a contributing editor for the art tech section of FlashArt, a magazine that I've been reading for too long, many decades, but one of the leading contemporary art magazines, I would say. And it reaches across the Atlantic. That's what always interested me about it. And you're also editorial director of Club NFT.

And maybe you could tell the listeners your own definitions of how would you define digital art and its relationship with blockchain and NFTs. And maybe you could start by giving us, you spoke about software art dates back to the 1960s. Maybe you could give the listeners just a very plotted history of digital art as you see it, and where it is now and maybe where it's going in the future, as we've just been speaking about the lack of a presence at, say, Free's Art Fair.

I would say that digital art began with the writings of Max Benzer, who was a German philosopher, driving conversations around computational aesthetics in the 1950s. And he was very influential on the first generation of computer artists, people such as Manfred Moore, Frida Naka, who's still producing beautiful art now, but also people who are becoming more and more familiar. Vera Molnar, who just had a show, sadly passed away last year at the age of 99, at the Pompidou.

That generation of computer artists paved the way for what we're seeing now. The one thing, of course, that that generation and generations up until 2021 didn't have was a recognized means of marketizing their work, which is what the NFT did. The NFT transparently financialized digital art. Of course, there was a pent-up demand for digital art. Otherwise, NFTs wouldn't have taken off. It could have been music.

It could have been something else. But for whatever reason, there was a demand for digital art, not least because we were all shut up in our homes during the pandemic. So the history of digital art, I think, is longstanding. Increasingly right now, I think the most popular form of digital art is what we've come to call generative art.

Generative art is art produced with autonomous systems. To give an example of that, Sol LeWitt, when he was writing his instructions for others to execute his wall drawings in the late 60s, was in effect creating an analogue form of generative art, which is to say he was writing instructions. He was writing an algorithm for someone else to execute, or to execute the system, as it were, or an output of the system that he created.

Today, we tend not to use analogue algorithms, we tend to use coded algorithms. You have this new generation of generative artists creating art using computer code. That has become a real community. It's the lifeblood of Web3, the digital art world in which I operate. In many ways, those artists are really sitting on the shoulders of giants like Vera Molna, Herbert V. Franke, and others, as well as Sol Le Witt.

I think when I speak to contemporary art folk, all of them have a working knowledge of solar wind, but they won't necessarily think of that kind of conceptualist idiom in terms of autonomous creation, in terms of algorithms. So coming back to my point about trying to unify these different communities, one of the things that it's important to do is to say that actually this stuff has been going on for years. You just didn't realize.

There's a wonderful book called The Digital Condition by a writer called Felix Stalder. I recommend your listeners to read that because one of the things that The Digital Condition is all about is this concept of algorithmicity. I think one of the things that we need now to understand is that actually algorithms date back to the Middle Ages.

One of the epistemological challenges of this digitizing age is asking us to look back at our previous histories, which no longer seem quite so fit for purpose. I think that's very useful as well. The Sol LeWitt works where he instructs other people to carry out instructions in an analog world to create the work of art. That seems to me to be a very good way of explaining what is actually going on with generative.

I would also say you could take that further and you could say that a catalog resume to some extent is an analog NFT. If you see the NFT as some kind of strange technology, then it will always be strange. But if you see it as a digital version of a catalog resume, then it's something more familiar. And I think if you had a work that you thought was by Andy Warhol that wasn't verified by the Andy Warhol estate, then you didn't have a valuable Andy Warhol or you didn't even have an Andy Warhol.

So I think the reality of the NFT is that it really is simply reiterating structures we already have in an unfamiliar or digital way. I think that's the moment we're in right now, is trying to close that gap, that literacy gap, I think, between these sort of old familiar structures that really define the market for art and these new digital equivalents. Yeah, it'd be interesting. Actually, we had a lecture from Daniel Smith, who's working on the catalogue résonne for Degas.

Our students had that lecture as an example of how to write catalogue résonne entries and how it differs or overlaps with, say, a Sotheby's or Christie's or Phillips' or Bonham's catalogue, which is often written with the same art historical discourse and apparent objectivity, but includes.

Deliberate subjective statements to get people to buy but but it's i think most of the listeners will realize that what you're saying there is that the catalogue resume or just to explain to the catalogue resume is written by you should be written by an objective academic who has no market interest in the artists they're talking about and that's interesting because we've got in our library we've got for example an ed rusker catalogue resume that is published by kagosian his dealer,

So, you know, are there conflicts of interest if you're getting a publisher who is the dealer asking the author? It may be possibly putting pressure on an author to include certain works that may be doubted by a more objective academic. But maybe you could explain briefly, Alex, what blockchain is doing that is similar to the catalogue, isn't it? Yeah, so a blockchain is a digital register of transactions and on a distributed, I should say, is a distributed or decentralized ledger.

And that's what principally distinguishes blockchain-based transactions. Registration from pre-web3 technologies. I tend to talk about web3 technologies, the principal ones being blockchain, NFTs, and smart contracts. NFTs and smart contracts rely, I think, on blockchain-based technology.

That being said, you can have a decentralized ledger, but in practice, in order for it to be usable, you need what's come to be known as layer two, infrastructure, which means stuff built on that decentralized infrastructure. Of course, the moment you have a layer two, whatever it might be, it might be a marketplace, it might be an exchange, whatever, in practice, you are centralizing an otherwise decentralized structure.

Of course, the moment you introduce centralization, you introduce hierarchy, you maybe reiterate the old habits that, of course, die hard. So one of the preoccupations that we've had at the magazine is saying, well, look, actually, decentralization for its own sake is not necessarily a good thing.

On the other hand, ethical centralization is different to the kind of hegemonic and gatekept centralization that I think the traditional art world, but also mainstream financial institutions have been shown to be fixated on. I think the blockchain was created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis for the very reason that centralized financial institutions were no longer regarded as serving the interests of the individual. So I do support the blockchain's will to decentralization.

But of course, like any technology under capitalism, it could be bent towards problematic end. And not least, I don't want my data, I don't want every behavior to be locked down in perpetuity on a register. On the other hand, you could say that the ability to certify a transaction transparently in perpetuity is a very good thing. It's something that the art world historically has been keen to willfully obscure.

So, yes, I think hopefully one takeaway from anyone who attends my lectures or anyone who listens to this podcast is this. I think it's important to be, you know, vibrantly skeptical about new technologies, whilst probably accepting that we need to engage with them. At least I think that's my reality. You can choose not to engage with that neoliberal, technosocial regime, but I think it's very hard to live these days without engaging with it.

Therefore, if you are forced to engage with it, I think one has to engage critically with it. Yeah, I remember one of the first blockchain systems or the output of a blockchain system that I witnessed was coffee and food production where you could authenticate, apparently.

The so basically the the person who picks the beans in guatemala sells the beans to a local company and then big markups they sell it internationally it maybe comes to london the coffee but if you bought it on the blockchain if you appreciated your final cup of coffee this particular web platform said would you like to would you like to give some money to the to the guy who picked the beans. Apparently the blockchain ensured that that money is a bit like tips in a restaurant.

Does it go to you? We often find ourselves asking the waiter. You know and that that seemed to assure the fact that you could actually reward the person that was producing that was doing the work so it's almost like a kind of not anti-capitalist but a way of making sure ethically that you could and i believe that there was a similar system then put in place for artists whereby if artists can sell their say nfts digital works they they can always they will always be insured a percentage

of any financial transaction will we'll definitely go back to them yeah so if the blockchain is a decentralized ledger of transactions then whatever you're selling whether it's you know art or coffee beans. You will in practice in principle maybe not in practice be able to ensure a kind of peer-to-peer transaction without a mediator of course what happened with with crypto art which in a way was an art form where you didn't have traditional mediators.

I use the example of Ozenachi, Nigerian crypto artist, who was rejected by mainstream galleries, but found a way to sell his work directly to collectors through the marketplace SuperRare. Now, at the time, SuperRare was a very inclusive marketplace, and in that sense was a very benign mediator. But he still, to some extent, even working on the blockchain, relied on some form of mediation in order to get his work to a collector.

Surprise, surprise, SuperRare ultimately became the most exclusive mediation.

Digital art marketplace on the blockchain, perhaps unsurprisingly, because it had already hoovered up the avant-garde of crypto artists. To track the recent history of crypto art is to some extent to track what happens when an inclusive and decentralized technology makes money for someone, because it quickly becomes quite centralized. And I would say that to come back to your point about resale royalties, which back in 2021, thanks to the work of artists such as Ozanachi.

Marketplaces generally were happy to affirm every time a work was resold, the artists would receive a 10% minimum resale royalty. Because over time, the bargaining power of collectors has increased so far over artists, the leading marketplaces no longer in practice do affirm resale royalties.

So we're living now in an age of blockchain-based transactions without the benefits of the smart contracts that had become a kind of progressive alternative to the mainstream art world, the traditional way of doing business. And so that's very frustrating from my perspective, of course, because it shows that however potentially progressive a technology might be, human beings have a habit of rendering them ultimately exploitative and extractive.

Funny how we do that. I'm not sure whether we're to blame or whether capitalism's to blame, but certainly that is something that I found deeply frustrating. Yeah, I remember when people first started talking about, or when I became aware of digital art and CryptoPunks and all of those things, I remember searching on Spotify, there are other platforms. For podcasts about collecting digital art. And the only ones that I came across were basically podcasts by, if I can say so, blokes.

Non-art historians, not obviously educated people, who were collecting cryptobunks and talking about them very excitedly, just like they were talking about the trainers that they were buying in drops. So it was very much coming from the street, if I can put it that way. And it does seem to me that one of the things that's happened is it's then been embraced, if you like, by, we might call it the bourgeoisie and the educated classes. I would say that...

That was the principal reason why I wanted, with the magazine, Right Click Save, to come to terms with the natively digital discourse. Actually, the first thing I ever wrote about crypto art was something called In Search of an Aesthetics of Crypto Art, which was based on data in early 2021 on the super rare marketplace. Specifically, the tags that artists were using to talk about their work.

Because for me, what I felt was if you could understand the language that the artists themselves were using, then you could have the best insight into, as it were, the values underpinning that community of artists and collectors. Indeed, initially, artists were selling to other artists and indeed now many collectors have become artists. There's a hybrid creative entrepreneur that is the particular animal of Web3.

Yes, I think it wasn't the intention of the magazine to be this sort of bourgeois insertion. Far from it, I think we wanted to be a listening exercise. We wanted to be a way to surface the critical language, shall we say, rather than the empty hype that underscored this new world. Yeah, it's difficult, isn't it? Because as both of us are educated people, we use that language, we're expected to use that language.

But I was very aware that all of this was kind of in some ways treading on the feet of people that, as you say, they wouldn't have even called themselves artists and the collectors wouldn't have called themselves collectors probably. But just changing the subject a little, in 2023 Artnet, the web platform praised you for your collaboration with the contemporary artist Ana Maria Caballero.

I wonder if you could tell us about that, because I think I saw you and Anna at the Lumen Art Prize Gala prize-giving event the other night, and it would be very interesting for you to talk about how you got to work with Anna. Yeah, in many ways, that was a very Web3 story in the sense that I think one of the essential things about Web3 is this notion of co-creation. And I think collaboration has been essential to the continuing discourse in Web3.

And so from from from my and Anna's perspective, we wanted to develop an alternative token economy that instead of enshrining hegemony and hierarchy. Upheld a kind of alternative set of values fit for an age of human-machine collaboration. Of course, if you're using generative AI, which is what we did end up using, extensive text and image prompts to produce our collection artifacts, which was nominated for the Lumen Prize this year.

We wanted to surface visual preoccupations that weren't obviously human and weren't obviously machine. They were somewhere in between. This notion of the hybrid, I think, is perhaps overly labored now. But I do feel that one thing that that collection of 100 digital tokens did was to visualize what human machine culture might look like, based partly on coinage of the past, but also, I think, on a preoccupation with natively digital or, dare I say, latent space.

So that was what we were really trying to get at with artifacts. And of course, by calling it artifacts true to form, it was not obviously saying this is art. It was saying that this is some kind of expanded understanding of imagery, one which acknowledges the relation of art and money as part of the history of art. But also, I think, hopefully in a way which was interesting and novel and uncanny. A lot of these digital coins do look like physical coins as they are displayed in a gallery.

It was inspired by specifically the early Byzantine economy pilgrim tokens that were the product of this cult surrounding St. Simeon Stylites, who was an ascetic saint who sat on top of columns and himself was a site of pilgrimage. What's interesting about Byzantine tokens is that they were... In many ways, inscriptions of the Holy Spirit in matter, ceramic or terracotta or lead specifically.

So if you were too ill to attend Mass, you would burn incense on your stylite token, and you would achieve commensurate spiritual grace or medicinal healing. The interesting thing for us was that it just reinforced that idea that you can have a token which isn't necessarily monetary. It might imprint or it might be embedded with a form of cultural value that isn't more than just exchange, that might be healing. It might be cultural.

And so for us, yeah, this image of the stylite token was something we wanted to get back to, which is, of course, an economy, a spiritual economy that emerged pre-capitalism. And before the notion of art in its kind of canonical Western sense really emerged, So for me, the fascinating thing is, actually, I felt to understand the world as it is right now, we needed to go back to a time before capitalism, before kind of modern finance and modern art. And hopefully folks feel we've done that.

Yeah, no, I took a look at some of those tokens and they certainly chime with me, coming again from a classical archaeological background. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, you were doing a lecture to all of the master's students at Sotheby's, part of our Art Futures shared curriculum, and you made what to me was a very nice surprise, actually. I was sitting at the back of the lecture room. A comparison between a cryptopump digital artwork with indeed an historical Byzantine coin or token.

I was about to ask you whether you could explain that and the importance of traditional, if you like, call it art history and understanding contemporary art, but I think you've kind of just done that, really. I think all I could say, perhaps, is that historically, I think that kind of sweeping comparison between an image produced in 2017 and an image produced in the 7th century would have been regarded as historically irresponsible.

The point I was making in the lecture was that if you follow the logic of Reinhard Kozilek and his theory of historical times, actually when you do make those juxtapositions, actually you can find some resonance. It's almost the fact that they don't necessarily map perfectly one onto the other, one counter onto the other.

That very mapping that that sort of discomforting mapping that sort of palimpsestic approach to art history i think actually can surface some interesting things but yes it you know prima facie it's a sloppy comparison i didn't think so i think it i think i think sometimes the the best new ideas or ways of changing one's own paradigms of thinking can be sloppy because they're kind of almost thrown out there. Have you ever thought of this?

It hasn't necessarily been developed into a PhD or whatever. I would say that that is exactly what we wanted to do with the magazine. We felt we needed a quick and dirty way of getting ideas about what was emerging out. As far as possible, we've tried to get scholars to... Also write for the magazine because invariably, if you're going through a lengthy peer review process, you might not be publishing for a lay community information that is important right now.

A lot of struggle I had having studied media theory was the feeling that the world at large was not aware, and specifically the digital art world, was completely unaware of the developing theories surrounding digital art that have been going on in the academy. This year, I'm a visiting research fellow at Goldsmiths, going back to school, as it were.

For me, one of the things I want to develop this year is a new publication, a new platform to get that research, whether it's being done by bachelor students or whether it's being done by leading scholars, out into the lay communities more quickly. For me, that old separation of the academy from the world at large is really stifling, I think, the mapping of ethical and intellectual ideas onto the market.

Of course, if those two worlds remain separate, that market becomes sheer hype, which I think is what it was in 2021 but hopefully is now values-based in a certain way yeah and it's all of this kind of continuing in many ways quite rightly this kind of snobbery about peer-reviewed is it a peer-reviewed article we ask our students when they're writing for us but i do think that there is and we do with our art business students in particular

where there isn't an established bibliography in the way there is for art history we do encourage them carefully to use other types of source because this is a cutting-edge thing. The development of art business and study of the art market as an academic discipline is very interesting. But I agree with you. I think to a certain extent, at least the origins of important ideas don't have to necessarily be in an obviously peer-reviewed traditional journal.

No, indeed. Now, I was talking to Joanna Zalinska, who's a wonderful scholar the other day. By chance, I just interviewed, I'm going to name drop here, Holly Herndon, Matt Dryhurst, Tyler Hobbs. I was looking for a title for this article and it was fascinating that one thing I couldn't help but feel I noticed was that both Matt and Tyler were using the language of liquid.

In their answers. Specifically, they were saying that the artist is either upstream of the model or downstream from the model. I couldn't help but feel that there was a sort of uncanny language that they were using that I think it was shared. It was sincere.

I don't know where it came from, but I found myself self-titling the article, Holly Herndon, Matt Dryhurst, and Tyler Harps on liquid images and i then asked joanna you know i said look i've used this term i hope you know you're happy with me using this because i quote her in the in the introduction and she says oh that's funny you say that i i developed liquid photographs you know a decade ago so what i thought was fascinating there was that i had sort of chosen a very similar language

based on listening to the artists themselves. But in practice, Joanna had been using that language already. But I think all of us had come to this language separately. So for me, that was a very good example of what happens when you listen to artists and let the language of the artists dictate the language with which you talk about their work.

But I think it also spoke to the disconnect between the artists, the art writers, and the scholars who haven't been talking to each other clearly enough for the last decade. That was probably a good example of what I was trying to do with the magazine, which was to bring those worlds together.

Yeah, and listen to the language of artists, or the verbal language, as it were, of artists, who I think traditionally have often felt uncomfortable talking to the critically trained art historian with a PhD. And I can see why. And as I said, coming back to these very interesting podcasts produced in the early days of collecting cryptobunks, etc. And it's just fascinating to just listen to that, the excitement of these people

who haven't been trained in anything. It's just coming straight off the street, you know. Yes, and indeed, it's fair to say, starting with clubhouse communities, but also then becoming, I think, more formalized in Twitter spaces. You know, a number of our articles are relative transcriptions of Twitter spaces between artists and collectors and critics. Because we feel that that kind of grassroots language is very important. That's the principal language that needs to be surfaced.

But of course, the fact that it's often spoken into the ether and not collected or not recorded is very frustrating because obviously there are limits to how much we could write down and publish ourselves, but certainly that was what we were trying to do.

I think also it was a challenge to this contemporary culture where almost the moment you say something it is it has a valence but then becomes irrelevant you know because it is not documented or because it's left out of a language model so that that's that's sort of where we find ourselves i do think you know when i was studying art history i think you know language was really uncool you know i think the idea of the of literature being somehow in any way relevant to art was super uncool.

I think one thing that AI art certainly affirms is the close bond between text and image. And of course, text and image is very much the province of the art historian. So I think art historians are more important than ever, not least because AI is clearly not only an art world phenomenon. It is maybe a testbed for the digital systems in which we live.

And so for me, the role of the artists, particularly transmedia artists right now, is in shaping a vision of these digital systems that is not extractive, is not exploitative, not least because artists tend to be the people who are listening most closely to or trying to investigate the problems of new technology. And of course, in Web2, the problems have been shown to be significant.

And so I'm very proud every time I interact with artists working with technology, because, invariably, they are looking at this technology with a critical lens. As a result, the words they use are the words we should be using to talk about this emerging space. Yes, so obviously I'll put a link to the right-click save in any literature, any text that goes along with this podcast.

But I was just going to ask you, maybe we could finish with you, as you were talking about engaging with artists, I know that you engage in philanthropic work for artists, and particularly artists suffering from degenerative diseases. And obviously we've got that pun on generative art and degenerative diseases. Could you tell us just a little bit about that, Alex, to finish? Yes, I started with a wonderful scholar, Fotini Valiante, who published the first paper on NFTs and museums at UCL.

She and I developed this platform called Regen, Regen Curates is the website. And we have done a series of auctions of work by generative artists, artists working with code, producing specifically long form generative projects, which means projects where you don't have one single output, but you might have as much as 200 outputs. Of course, if you're selling 200 outputs, it's a bit like selling 200 editions of a print, except each edition is different.

And so in a sense, its value is somewhat magnified. And in any case what that proved to be was a very successful way of raising money and yes we felt that you know in order to kind of construct a compelling envelope we we we decided to support degenerative diseases charities so we've supported the the als association cure parkinson's and indeed we'll be we'll be supporting cure cubed again in its 2025 edition which is going to be in early february and we've got 12 wonderful

generative artists who are going to be releasing work to coincide with that. And the, yes, so, so we've been, we've been supporting different charities and we feel that generative art is a good way of raising money because it, as I say, it doesn't just produce one output. It can produce, you know, an algorithm can produce hundreds or thousands of outputs. The question is if, you know, the market is going to value that.

And I think, you know, that we find ourselves at a moment now where long form generative bar, which boomed in 2021, is not quite so reliable. So we have a sort of delicate dance deciding how many outputs the artists are going to release or how much they're comfortable releasing. But no, it's proved to be, I would say again, a model for how we might raise money and how crypto might be used positively to support good causes.

There's no question when the Ukraine Russia war began, a lot of money was raised for Ukraine very quickly through crypto. And so, yes, I think normalizing that as a way of raising money rather than as a purely speculative vehicle is very important. Obviously, much of the media attention about crypto tends to be negative. But of course, it is also a quick and dirty way of getting money to the right places quickly. So that's something that I think we've just tried to contribute to.

Yeah, just like that analogy I use for the person picking the coffee beans. Totally. And no one can interfere with, well, if the system's working properly, no one can interfere with that.

Anyway, Alex, just on behalf of all the listeners, I'd like to thank you for your time today. And I think listeners will get a lot from listening to your podcast because Because the great thing about podcasts, I always think, is what we were just saying just now, that, you know, we're not being critiqued. No one's going to critique this. We're not being critiqued by anyone. We're saying things we're often forgetting.

You know, I forgot that, of course, the Estric Collection shows Italian artists, not a French artist like Coro. We forget things. But this is what's lovely about podcasts, I think. People can listen to them and they love the spontaneity of them. So thank you very much, Alex. thanks very much for having me David. Music.