Curating Value Exchange: Presentation + Q&A with Hito Steyerl

By encouraging contemporary art museums to experiment with similar value flow curation, we hope to initiate a friendly, positive-sum competition among cultural institutions to connect in deeper ways with the material conditions of art workers and audiences.

First the Bundeskunsthalle would send fees to the artist subdomain. The owner of that account would then use those funds to purchase travel, accommodation, raw materials, all that is required for the event, and send the remainder to each artist’s address. With this system, the entire value chain is transparent for everyone to audit.

While there are many interesting blockchain governance experiments and technologies to choose from, our proposal opts for a simple, practical administrative mechanism: a multi-sig held by museum employees.

The Ethereum Name Service affords radical transparency, making it possible to assign public domain names to blockchain addresses held by specific transacting entities.

 Our solution is to introduce a transparency device: using a public blockchain to make financial information accessible among a wider set of stakeholders, including artists, art audiences, art workers, and peer institutions.