Fundamentals

In the $65.1B global art trade, the work is represented by two separate, yet equally important groups: Christie's and Contemporaries. The Secondary Market consists of the market for resale for works by living artists. Depending on the bull or the bear, these market structures may or may not converge with the slightly less exhuberant market for Old Masters and antiquities. We identify Contemporaries as those whose active engagement with the forms of representation that affect our daily life through institutions made actual and manifest at the site of their operations.

There is no formal definition for what constitutes "success" in art, financial or otherwise. In extensive, yet opaque, collaboration with the Union Bank of Switzerland, the auction houses provide and maintain the only public price indexes for the sale of "Blue Chip" masterworks. This means that "mid-sized" and "emerging" galleries--rely heavily on consensus mechanisms: reputation, pseudonymous identity, gossip, and word of mouth message passing. In Quantifying Success and Reputation In Art, the art economist and entrepreneur breaks down the strong history of path dependence in art:

>Recognition depends on variables external to the work itself, like its attribution, the artist’s body of work, the display venue, and the work’s relationship to art history as a whole (2, 3)

The art world, so called, has not been built out of sheer genius, unadulterated creativity and swiss bank accounts but rather has been implemented on top of a city. New York City proved Modern Art's testing ground; here, the Museum of Modern Art is the Mecca of Modern and Contemporary art worldwide. Designed by architect Philip Johnson in the international style, the museum's collections were key in securing the survival of 19th century masterpieces in the U.S. during the interwar period. The 53rd st. building opened nine days after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

>"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance..."

As on the internet where sharing is based on cooperating servers identified by registration and agreeing on protocols, value in art is based on established beliefs and practices that maintain the price stability of established careers on the secondary market and the agility to incorporate new paths

It's tempting to believe that the contemporary art market-- cotemporaneous with the internet and the emergence of the a world systems politics (the work has yet to be done on Black Mountain College vs. Xerox Parx)-- maybe, like every other 20th century institution, is crumbling, yes-- either under its own obsolescence or its own lies.

Something's gotta give. We need something lighter, something newer. More transparent. More liquid. Is that right?

In the past few years many major players in both finance and art have quickened to invest in what begs to differ from a Bottles of Beer Methods for corporate equities trading.

This begs the question: What Wasn't Working?

>"No one can be slain in absentia"

a Value Proposition for the clean-slate, peer-to-peer operating system known as Urbit

> The federated wiki concept does more than just help editors own their own data, Max Ogden, a Code for America fellow who has advised Cunningham, tells Wired. It enables dissent. > "Wikipedia forces you to give up your own perspective," Ogden says. There are issues that no one will agree on, but with the federated wiki model, everyone can have their own version of controversial pages. "And they're all linked together, so you can still explore them like a wiki."

•Legitimating an extensive co-exhibition network across a sufficiently usable read/write protocol

> The radical idea of the wiki was to put an edit button on every page. The radical idea of the federated wiki is to put a "fork" button on every page.

# How

# Why