Roundtable 1 // Curators in Conversation

Hello, my name is Colin Goldberg and today is Monday, October 3, 2022. I'd like to welcome you to the first Expressionism Roundtable discussion entitled Curators in Conversation. To get started, I'd like to introduce my guests, Helen A. Harrison and Christiane Paul. Helen A. Harrison is a former New York Times art critic and NPR arts commentator. She's the current director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York. A specialist in modern American art, Harrison has served as the curator of the Parish Art Museum and Guildhall Museum and was guest curator at the Queens Museum. Her books include Hampton's Bohemia, Two Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach, as well as monographs on Jackson Pollock and Larry Rivers and three mystery novels set in the New York art world.

Colin Goldberg

Christiane Paul is professor of the Center for the Arts at the University of New York. She has a master's in the School of Media Studies at the New School, as well as curator of digital art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is a recipient of the Thoma Foundation's 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. Her writings include A Companion to Digital Art, published by Blackwell Wiley in 2016. Digital Art, published by Thames & Hudson with editions in 2003, 2008, 2015 and 2023.

Colin Goldberg

Context Providers, Conditions of Meaning in Digital Art. She has a master's in Media Arts, published by Intellect in 2011 with a Chinese edition in 2012, and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, published by UC Press in 2008. At the Whitney Museum, she curated exhibitions including Programmed, Rules, Codes and Choreographies in Art, 1965 to 2018, Chorearch Angel, Pro Tools in 2011, and Profiling in 2007. Ms.

Colin Goldberg

Paul is responsible for Artport, the museum's portal to Internet art. It's an honor and pleasure to have you both here today for this conversation. Thanks so much for having me. Oh, you're welcome. And welcome. Welcome to you both. To provide a bit of background on myself, my practice explores the relationship between technology and personal expression, bridging multiple disciplines, notably painting and digital media. I'm honored to have been a recipient of grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the University of New York, and the University of New York. I'm also a member of the Pollock Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts, and currently I live and work in the Green Mountains of Southern Vermont with my wife Donna and our daughter Aya. I first used the term Techspressionism in 2011 as the title for a solo exhibition in Southampton, New York.

Colin Goldberg

Techspressionism, which is the topic of our discussion today, is defined in Wiktionary as an artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience. Some of the philosophical framework around Techspressionism is the idea that the individual is the subject of the exhibition. The text is outlined in the Techspressionist Manifesto, which I first published on medium in 2014. This text was inspired by artistic manifestos of the past, including Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto and Breton's Surrealist Manifesto.

Colin Goldberg

Techspressionism was first described as a movement in the Wired article if Picasso had a MacBook Pro in 2014 and received its first television coverage in a 2015 episode of the PBS show Art Loft. The use of Techspressionism as a hashtag on social media has long been a trend. The term has allowed technology-based artists to self-identify with the term. Since the summer of 2020, there have been over 49,000 posts published on Instagram using the hashtag Techspressionism.

Colin Goldberg

The use of the hashtag has functioned as a primary research mechanism in the curatorial process of developing an artist index, an online community for artists using technology in their work. Over the past two years, Techspressionism has developed into an online community, including artists from over 40 countries. The project's development was inspired in part by the concept of social sculpture invented by the artist Joseph Beuys.

Colin Goldberg

Techspressionist artists meet in regularly scheduled online salons to share work and discuss ideas. These recorded meetups are conceived of as a modern counterpart to the surrealist salons of the past. Ann Spalter, artist and author of Computer and the Visual Arts, published by Addison Wesley, has described Techspressionism as follows.

Colin Goldberg

Techspressionism is introduced in the world of art. It is used as a new art historical term to describe fine artists using digital technology to convey subjective emotional content. Techspressionism distinguishes expressive fine art from such genres as digital art, which can include animated movies and video games, as well as from new media works that may not embody convincing artistic intent. The subjective lens of the individual artist, rather than the product of a corporate studio, is what connects Techspressionism to its predecessor, expressionism.

Colin Goldberg

Techspressionists present the world from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically in order to evoke moods or ideas, seeking to express their emotional experience rather than physical reality. This past summer, I had the honor of curating Techspressionism's first large-scale physical group exhibition, digital and beyond, which opened at Southampton Art Center in Southampton, New York, in spring of 2022.

Colin Goldberg

Techspressionism digital and beyond is a space that takes me to the information in that it can be decidedly shown to be more than an eight-character relationship. And beyond included the works of over 90 artists working with technology from more than 20 countries around the world, including Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Canary Islands, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Peru, Puerto Rico, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, and the United States.

Colin Goldberg

Notable contemporary artists featured in the exhibition, as defined by Wikipedia, included Victor Acevedo, Suzanne Anker, Frank Gillette, Clive Holden, Patrick Lichty, Chalda Maloff, Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, Steve Miller, Joseph Necfatal, Michael Rees, Christine Schooley, Nina Sobell, Anne Spalter, and Nina Yankovic.

Colin Goldberg

I'm going to close this monologue, hopefully it wasn't too long, with a short drone fly-through video. The exhibition shot by my friend Joanna Steidle, who's a drone artist and fellow Techspressionist. And then I'm going to open the conversation with an introductory question for each of our guests. So I'm just going to share my screen here.

Thank you.

Okay, I hope that came came across all right. So I am going to open up the conversation now and I'm going to start with a question for Helen, who is the exhibition's senior advisor. What was it that originally interested you about idea of Techspressionism?

Of course I've known you for a long time Colin and watched your development and I think when you first approached me back in 2011- oh my gosh that's eleven years ago now- and asked me if I would contribute to the exhibition you were doing in Southampton, I thought about the history, being a historian, of course, I looked back and thought about how artists had adapted technological change for their own personal purposes, rather than being sucked in by the technology itself as a means, as an end in and of itself. That it became a means to an end that was already a subjective approach, a subjective desire on the artist's part to express himself or herself, and then find the appropriate technology or the appropriate means by which to do that. And of course you can think specifically of Jackson Pollock, who learned how to use liquid material in very expressive and inventive ways.

Helen A. Harrison

But of course he didn't invent it. It was a technology that he adopted through his exposure in a workshop run by a Mexican muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros. And Siqueiros came to New York in 1936 and opened what he called an experimental workshop with the aim of using modern materials and unorthodox techniques to express whatever subjective intent he had. Right. Right. And so, you know, there are numerous examples of work that were done at that time using primarily industrial materials, but especially, notably liquid paint. And the fact that this unorthodox material suited Pollock's needs is the paramount thing. As he himself said in an interview, it doesn't matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is done. But if it's done correctly, then it's done very well. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

Helen A. Harrison

So the statement is paramount and the means are the end, are the ways of achieving that end. And I think that when I saw your work and how you were approaching technology in this very expressive and personal and subjective way, that was the appeal for me.

Thank you. I appreciate that response. And so now I'm going to... Have a question for Christiane, who sort of this came about to some degree because after the exhibition, there was a panel discussion that was organized by the exhibition's media sponsor, James Lane Post, about Web3 and the blockchain. And Christiane Paul was a moderator on a panel called Art and Web3. And some of the panelists, or actually all the panelists were artists in the Techspressionism exhibition. So I was very pleased that she had gotten to see the show. And I've been to the shows that she curated at the Whitney and was very happy to be able to, you know, have this conversation happen. So my initial question for Christiane is, having had a chance to experience the Techspressionism digital and beyond exhibition, can you provide your initial thoughts on the term Techspressionism and specifically how it may relate to art and web?

Colin Goldberg

Historical movements of the past, as well as digital art at large.

Thanks so much for the great question, Colin. And also big thanks to you and Helen for your statements and making this conversation possible. I am going to share a few slides. And I really want to get to the term of expressionism in relationship to art historical terminologies and medium specificity and what it means to curatorial practice specifically.

Christiane Paul

So I just randomly threw in this slide from Tate, Helen gave great definitions of expressionism, as did you. And both of you highlighted that expressionist art tends to focus on the emotional expression of subjective. It was a break with representationalism. It was also deeply tied to abstraction. And if you look at this list that Tate gives here, then it also becomes clear that expressionism covered broad, broad territory and styles ultimately. You have anyone from Max Beckmann and Paul Klee to Francis Bacon and Giacometti in here. So very, very different approaches.

Christiane Paul

And I want to keep that in mind. And then coming back to your manifesto, Colin, and to the definition of Techspressionism, you state that this is an artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience. And here I have a few questions. Of course, it's always so difficult to draw the line between art that is or is not expressing emotional experience. Most Most artists tend to be deeply involved into their work and into what they're doing. You know, there's always emotional investment.

Christiane Paul

Whenever people ask a writer about whether their work is autobiographical or not, many of them would say, well, you know, it's not really Venn's, but all I write is autobiographical because it's me and my emotional experience here. So I want to tie this a little bit to the definition of digital art. Actually differs quite a bit from the one you quoted from Anne Spalter, whose work I really deeply admire, and she's a great colleague. So in its narrow definition, digital art is art that is created, stored, and presented by means of digital technology. So created by means of the then stored on drives, presented on screens, etc. Not quite overlapping with what we've seen in the Expressionism show. And art that is created by means of digital technologies and uses characteristics of the medium.

Christiane Paul

Once again, that applies to the narrower definition. It would be computable, interactive, real time, generative. And a few of the works in the Expressionism show are, but not all of them. And it could also... It could also be seen in a broader definition as art that is created by means of digital technologies and presented as an object that reflects on the digital medium. This is a more recent material term that we have seen often described as the post-digital.

Christiane Paul

Younger artists in particular have been using digital technologies to create, let's say, sculptures or paintings that never could be created in any other way. But they present themselves as an object we may be used to in terms of art historical references. But that work also reflects on the digital medium. And that to me is a crucial distinction and cutoff line that I think conflicts a little bit with Expressionism.

Christiane Paul

So I think the main distinction we need to make in digital art is art using digital technologies. And that's why I think we need to make art using digital technologies as a tool for the creation of an art object. And I would argue that most of the work you're seeing in galleries today uses technologies as a tool. Be it a digital printer, be it CNC milling or CAD models for a sculpture. Frank Stella has been using digital technologies for a long, long time.

Christiane Paul

But that work does not necessarily reflect conceptually on the medium and engages with it. And to me, that is a necessity for digital art, which also means that what we're seeing in Expressionism transcends digital art. By definition, I think it would also cover part of the work that uses the technologies as a tool. I'm using a few screenshots from the virtual tour of the Expressionism show here. And one thing I also would like to highlight is that we're seeing so different kinds of art. So we have different media. So in the center here, we have Michael Rhee's augmented reality work relating to sculptural work. And then we have many, many different forms of print, screen-based work, etc. Here. And I think that work does not always necessarily make a statement about the digital medium. It goes beyond it.

Christiane Paul

So one of my questions now is, as a curator, would be where do we draw the lines here? Because medium specificity is so important to me as a curator in making crucial distinctions between works. I am all for building art historical connections. And I think it is very important to see abstract digital work in the context of Expressionism.

Christiane Paul

I tried to build some of those connections. In the exhibition you mentioned, Program Rules, Codes and Choreographies in Art from which was mounted at the Whitney Museum in 2018-2019. And the show which I co-curated with Karen Mancusi Ongaro and Clemence White was basically looking at two art historical trajectories.

Christiane Paul

One of them conceptual art. And you see here one of Solowitz's stories. And you see the structures in the foreground. Donald Judd in the background. And towards the back you see work by, let me go back, Casey Rios. I will talk about it in a second. And then the other part of the exhibition focused more on the algorithmic or programmed rearrangement of moving image sequences. And messing with signals and resolution. And I just wondered, what is the difference between the two? And I just want for a second to stay with Casey Rios.

Christiane Paul

Which is, yeah, kind of interesting to consider within the concept of Expressionism. Casey is one of the artists who from the start has drawn a lot of attention to the coded back end of digital art. And built connections to conceptual art. So we have here on the right Solowitz's wall drawing. And on the left work by Casey. Which was originally, I don't know, a work by the artist. And then on the right, I think, shown on the web. A commission for the art board website.

Christiane Paul

So two software structures here that start with written instructions. And of course, they are abstractions. They are highly conceptual work. But I think they would also be, by your definitions, a form of Techspressionism. Because there is a lot of emotional content. Expressionism. Expressionism is expressed here. So I just want to problematize the term a little bit. And see where the boundaries of it lie. And finally, I also want to talk a little bit about art board and the work I'm doing there. Once again, I would say that by your definitions, so many of the works would qualify as Techspressionism. And the artists may not necessarily align themselves with the term. So as part of Artport, which features a lot of commissions, we also do the Sunrise Sunset series. And that is work that every morning and every evening at sunrise sunset time in New York disrupts the Whitney.org website for 30 seconds.

Christiane Paul

And I'll just show you one example by La Turbo Avedon, which was this overlaid mirror onto the website. And what you see in the mirror is a fly-through of an apartment that La Turbo constructed. So there are seven different morning and seven different evening mirrors or fly-throughs. And the work was also highly emotional in that it captured our experience during the pandemic, questioning the thresholds here between the online and the online. So there are three different ways that we can see the world you're looking into the online and offline world. So you're not quite sure what you're seeing through this mirror. Are you looking into someone's apartment? Or could it be seen as a reflection of your own space?

Christiane Paul

So I'll stop sharing here and return to the discussion.

I think we're going to wrap up the slides and the discussion so far. So that pretty much leads into my next question, which is a solicitation of questions. So I wanted to open this up to the two of you. Would either one of you have any specific questions for each other or for myself on the topic of Techspressionism to expand our dialogue? And then I figure we can just sort of let the conversation develop organically from there.

Well, I think Christiane really hit on a crucial point. Which is where are the boundaries? Should there be boundaries? Is there some way of determining how much subjectivity is injected into the ultimate image or the ultimate work of art? Whether or not the technology is contributing to that. I mean, you could think of certain, well, like for example, in your exhibition, Colin, you had printmakers.

Helen A. Harrison

Printmaking is a technology. It's not a digital technology, but it could be. But the kind of technology that was, I guess, primarily the foregrounded in the show was digital technology and some of it animated as well. In fact, in your fly-through, you showed Nina Jankowicz's two-panel animation. And you could only do that digitally. There's no other way. But could she have achieved the same kind of image result using a digital technology? And that's a different technology. That's also another question. Is this technologically specific? Or can it be translated into other media?

Yeah, I think you raise a lot of great questions, Helen. And that was precisely what I was trying to get to. So first of all, just reiterating your important point, of course, all art is technological ultimately. Paint is a technology. Photography, of course, printing. So artists have used technologies for centuries.

Christiane Paul

But then those technologies also have very different qualities, obviously. One thing I like about expressionism is that as a term, it could also transcend boundaries. And in terms of the question of whether we need to clearly delineate things, I'm all for openness. And I think expressionism already fulfills an important function. If there are artists aligning themselves with that term and finding a platform to discuss issues relevant to their work, that's always, I think, a function that makes a term valuable. In terms of digital art curation, I also need to make a set of other distinctions.

Christiane Paul

I mean, paint, of course, is a medium. Painting is a medium that has so many different genres. But I think digital technology has really increased the range of forms. If you think about virtual reality, augmented reality, software art, massive installations, networked or not. So those are all very, very important. But then there are also very different manifestations.

Christiane Paul

So I think there's more variety within the digital. And in order to discuss aesthetics art historically, I think I need to introduce more distinctions into that umbrella of expressionism.

Well, what kind of distinctions did you do you foresee?

Well, first of all, coming back to what I said. One of the main distinctions for me is that between the tool and the medium. And I don't want to belabor any form and content distinctions. To me, those, of course, always collapse. You use a specific form or medium to express conceptual issues, and the two of them ultimately cannot be separated. An artist has a reason why they make their work as a sculpture and not as a photograph, because the sculpture best expresses what they want to express. That being said, there are artists who use digital technologies as a tool in the creation of a work that maybe speaks to abstraction.

Christiane Paul

It speaks to maybe expressionism. In some ways. But it is not a statement and not conceptually engaging with the aesthetics of the digital per se. To me, that's a major distinction. So you could have a photograph that is deeply digital in that it gets to issues of the digital and plays with representational spectrum within that. And others where clearly the technology is predominantly a tool.

Isn't that the distinction that sometimes the technology can overwhelm the content? The technology becomes, you know, it kind of sucks all the oxygen out of the image.

Oh, absolutely absolutely not so this is precisely what I do not mean you know that would be accusing Pollock of sucking the oxygen out of paint because you know what he's doing here is putting so much emphasis on the process itself and what that is good digital art by nature is not techno fetishism But I think most augmented reality pieces make a statement about their representational status. How do they interact with the real world? Michael Rees's work is a perfect example of that. And I would not say that he's overwhelming us. No, he's getting to important issues within what he's doing. So I wouldn't want... Collapse the distinction I'm making into technological overwhelming. I'm talking really about engaging with conceptual issues related to the medium versus using it as a tool.

Christiane Paul

I mean, a lot of sculptures that are created on the basis of CAD models or maybe even through CNC milling, they do not speak about the digital per se.

And they do not want to be seen that way.

Like a balance, that there has to be a balance between the technology and what it's expressing.

No, I'm simply trying to make a distinction in order to define digital art. So a photograph in a gallery that has been digitally printed to me is not digital art. The same as a scan of the Mona Lisa on the web is not digital art. Here we're dealing with a remediation or with a tool and that functionality.

Well, it's also a reproduction. That's a reproduction of something else rather than original. Yeah.

So the Mona Lisa was another example because that gets to remediation. But using the technologies just as a tool, and I don't mean that in a way that's too much. I don't mean that in any discrediting way. But using it as a tool to create a more traditional art object that speaks more to painting, photography or sculpture than it does to the digital, that to me is a dividing line for digital art. I would not include a work in a digital art show just because it used some digital process in its making. And I'm arguing here purely art historically and aesthetically.

Christiane Paul

I think there's a different set of aesthetic vocabulary that I would apply to one versus the other.

I mean, I could speak to that a little bit in terms of the sort of origin story of the term for me, which kind of came about, you know, it sort of started when I was in graduate school before the term was anything that I had used. When I saw that, you know, as I was doing my MFA, I would think of it as the sort of side of like a pain in the ass. And I think that's what I think of in what I think of it in my own head. And I think that's what I think of in my own head. And I think that's what I think of in my own head. And I think that's what I think of in my own head. And I think that's what I think of in my own head. And I think that's what I think of in my own head. And I think that's what I think of in my own head. And I think that's what I think of in my own head. And I think that's what I think of in my own head.

Colin Goldberg

And I think that's what I think of in my own head. And I think that's what I think of in my own head. Academic setting. And I, you know, I felt strongly, you know, that I was there for a different reason, you know, I was there creating art objects. And like the work behind me, you know, as you were speaking, it made me made me think that, you know, the work I really consider to be painting in that it's work on linen with acrylics that has a digitally drawn component that's overprinted and then overpainted. So much in the way that the pop artists like Rauschenberg might have used photo silkscreen, I'm employing digital printmaking in sort of an abstract expressionistic way. And the term Techspressionism was invented, because I felt that digital art wasn't an accurate descriptor of my own work, in the sense that, you know, it didn't feel comfortable to me to call it digital art when it's a work on linen, that involves digital processes.

Colin Goldberg

But, you know, that being said, the two paintings behind me, the larger pieces are part of a series called my wireframe paintings that do directly reference the language of digitality in the sense that, you know, they have elements, the digitally drawn elements, definitely derive some of their aesthetic from CAD drawings and things of that nature. So I could sort of see it, you know, both ways. But it's interesting, you know, to hear, you know, the work that you're doing, and I think it's interesting to hear about the idea of digital art being something that's referencing the medium itself in terms of the subject matter.

Colin Goldberg

And, you know, the definition of Techspressionism as far as work that has an emotional component, that is extremely difficult for anyone to determine externally, you know, so part of what I think has been really interesting for me over the course of this project is finding those moments where people have literally come to me and said, Hey, do you know, is this an art that you're to me, it describes what I'm doing. There was one artist, Davante Bradley, Davo, who came in and he was the moderator of most of our early salons. And, you know, my interaction with him, my initial interaction with him was pretty much of that nature. And when we corresponded and spoke over the phone, it really gave me a feeling that there was something, you know, important here to be done in terms of the fact that artists were self-identifying, you know, with the term.

Colin Goldberg

And that, you know, gave me sort of the, you know... Fuel to, to keep it going.

I remember when Anne was speaking at one of our salons, she was talking about how taking her work to a gallery and offering it for exhibition and everyone was very thrilled with it and really loved it. But when they found out that it was digital, that it was, you know, done in a reproductive medium, so to speak, they, they weren't interested because printmaking and things, reproductive technologies in general are devalued in the art world, or certainly have been for up until now. Although with the rise of NFTs, I don't know that it could be a whole game changer as far as attitudes go, but the fact that reproductive technology, which is not considered serious in the art world, is a real detriment because it doesn't take into account the, the actual, the actual image, the, you know, what, what the artist is trying to say.

Helen A. Harrison

If you want to go back to Pollock's definition of that, that art has to make a statement, that the statement is really the primary thing and not how you got there, but what, what you achieved in the end.

Yeah, I think this discrimination, against reproductive technologies is changing and has been radically changing at least for younger generations now over the past couple of decades. Of course, we're also still dealing with institutions where those categories are deeply inscribed, you know, but I think that is definitely eroding over time. And I think Colin, you also perfectly captured it. As I said, if people really find their term in text, expressionism and something that really deeply captures that practice, that's wonderful. And that also means that a term like that needs to exist. And to your prior description of your work, I think that was a beautiful example for the distinctions I'm trying to make, you know, and once again, they are distinctions that are more geared towards, you know, aesthetics and an understanding of the nature of the work.

Christiane Paul

If you're using technologies in layering paint on fabric and ultimately, you know, it's more important to you that this work exists painterly on fabric with the help of all of those technologies, you know, that to me falls a bit more on the tool side. While the other paintings that you referenced in the back really speak much more about the nature of the work. In particular, you talked about how it's much more about the digital and its framework. And once again, that's not a classification in terms of value of work. It's really more about literacy and making distinctions because ultimately all of the boundaries would vanish. I'm by no means in the Greenbergian camp of, of being hard set on medium purity and medium specificity. But in order to have literacy in media, we also need to see the differences and the range of expression.

Christiane Paul

And we have always had that for painting. And I don't think it should vanish with the digital.

And digital, you know, when Helen said a reproductive technology, my sort of my knee jerked because generally, you know, what I print on the linen, I would consider drawing in the sense that I draw it digitally on a tablet, but it, you know, I think digital technology, it's sort of unique in the sense, well, maybe not so much so. I mean, in terms of it being a creative technology as well as a reproductive or potentially creative technology, as well as a potentially reproductive technology in the sense that, you know, things originate, you know, digitally. And like some of the work that I did back in the 90s, the late 90s and 2000s, there were digital drawings. And I thought of the actual work as the file, you know, like the output, the print was sort of a manifestation or a physicalization of the work.

Colin Goldberg

And now I've sort of resurrected those pieces and started animating them into NFTs because I feel like finally, there's, you know, there's a way to do it. And I think that's, I don't really know, I would say, you know, an NFT is a distribution mechanism or I've sort of described it in that way. I recently was, you know, in a Twitter sort of back and forth with curator John Ippolito, who actually is the son of my undergraduate painting professor, Angelo Ippolito, who I studied under at Binghamton. And I thought it was really interesting. And he had posted something about NFTs, and there's, you know, NFTs could span a spectrum of things that are conceived of as art to collectibles, to all sorts of a variety of things.

Colin Goldberg

And, you know, to me, the term NFT describes a delivery mechanism, not even necessarily a medium per se. So, you know, I think that the timing of NFTs and their rise in popularity, you know, sort of aligned with the development of this project into a group. And I thought it was really interesting to watch that happening. You

Know. Well, you say if it's simply a delivery mechanism, what's interesting to me about it is that it, you're really looking at two different parallel things happening. One is the development of technology for artistic expression, and the other is the marketplace. And if the marketplace accepts NFTs, you know, you're going to have to do a lot of work. So, you know, as a valid way of marketing and distributing digital art or any other kind of art for that matter. I mean, not all of it is created digitally, but the idea that you, that these things have value, have monetary value apart from expressive value, that kind of convergence is very interesting because that really has not been the case up till now.

I want to build on that a little bit. I know we could say that we're going to have to do more and spend the last three, the next three hours, you know, talking about NFTs, and we definitely do not have the time. But once again, I just wanted to make some distinctions here. NFTs per se as non-fungible tokens are certificates of authenticity with smart contract and metadata and also a sales platform. Yeah. So to me, also interesting that to some extent in the lingo, the sales mechanism itself has been commodified. That being said, you know, there are distinctions to make between NFTs that consist ultimately of hanging JPEGs on the blockchain, which I'm not interested in.

Christiane Paul

You know, so JPEGs, which once again could change, could just be images remediated of a physical artwork, for example. And to me personally, that is not interesting. I also find it frustrating that digital art gets conflated now very often with JPEGs or little animated clips. But there are also artists and there have been artists since 2014 who have been really using the blockchain as a medium. That to me is interesting about NFT art. And that is when NFTs and the blockchain becomes a medium. So within that spectrum of NFTs, we're once again looking at the pure certificate of authenticity and sales mechanism for a JPEG and then really work that uses the blockchain as a medium.

So the kind of commercialization of digital art or things that are created technologically really expands not only the market, but also the audience. I mean, you could not, Colin, you could not have put together the exhibition that you did and presented it the way you did without the Internet and access to people all over the world who were able to send in their work because much of it was digital. Much of it was physical. But you didn't necessarily get a physical object. You got a file and you were able to create the physical object from that file. So this is a whole new way of putting together exhibitions and of presenting the work and making it accessible to people, collecting it and disseminating it.

Yeah, I totally agree, Helen. Also, that has been going on, of course, when it comes to the Internet as a platform for distributing art since the 90s, of course, so net art came about in the early 90s. And we have seen representation of art and the widening of art audiences and web-based art for the past 30 years. Definitely digital art also has been collected for decades and decades. But the market now, has really changed through NFTs and that attention that has been brought to it. I also want to make very clear, looking at the statistics of it all, that there is only a relatively small overlap in the Venn diagram of NFT collectors and the collectors who become really invested into and interested in, digital art. That's only a certain segment and a relatively small segment of that whole group.

Christiane Paul

But certainly, it's been a big advantage that digital art, whether misunderstood or not, has been all over the press.

Well, if it provides a platform for artists to get their message out, and even if it doesn't result necessarily in sales or in the kind of art world, quote unquote, success, that a traditional art expression would, I think that it just really opens up a whole new avenue for people to connect. And to, as Colin said, people say, I found my people. This is where I was kind of shooting in the dark. And now suddenly I'm with a whole group who agree with what I'm trying to do and who are sympathetic and supportive. Even if that support doesn't translate into money.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. And not only money, but also understanding of the work, because once again, many of the NFT collectors are not necessarily interested in art or the aesthetics. And you see a lot of flipping, which you do not see. And I think that's a really important thing when it comes to art collection per se. Like the serious art collectors, sure, at some point they might put their matisse on the market, but many of them are holding on to the work because they feel a deep connection to it. And that's actually been the same with NFT collectors who are deeply invested into the artist and connected to the work. They're not going to resell to make a 200% profit.

Absolutely. And as an artist myself, I find that just the ability for a visual artist to receive a royalty payment on a secondary market sale is a pretty big deal. I couldn't really wrap my head around it until I had my first secondary market sale. And it was a small royalty, but it happened completely automatically when the work was resold to another collector. And that illustrated to me like sort of how powerful that is in terms of, you know, it sort of has changed the model, I think, in many ways. And it seems like the art market and the NFT market, they're definitely two very separate spaces. Oh, yeah.

They tried to do that. I think it was in California, if I remember correctly, that when an artwork was sold, that the artist, you know, a painting or a sculpture, a traditional artwork, that the artist would get a cut. And it was unenforceable.

Yeah. But we also have to be aware of the fact that this is a U.S. Issue. It is legislation in other countries. And it seems that in the U.S. It was only possible to achieve this through the market itself and through the NFT landscape. This is also what motivated Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash in 2013 to present their monographs, proto-NFTs at the New Museum in New York. It was about resale rights for artists.

Christiane Paul

And at the time it didn't take off, partly because the technological framework wasn't there yet. But I find it interesting that this seems to be the way of getting it done, you know, in other countries it has been done through legislation.

Because, I mean, as an artist and not identifying as necessarily curator, even though I have this limited experience, or an art historian, you know, I'm often reminded that when I look through an art history book, there is really no work in there that isn't, you know, there because it has become, you know, valued. That is, you know, it's achieved and sustained value over time. And that's, you know, a component of its, you know, historical relevance in some way. I wouldn't say that's why it's there, but I think- But it could be the other way around.

It could be that the reason that it's valuable is because it's in the book.

Right.

That's how you build the canon. Yeah.

That makes sense. Well, this has been, I think we're coming up on time here, but it's been a really fantastic conversation. And I really want to thank you all, the two of you, for coming today. And yeah.

And if either of you have any last thoughts or- Well, I just want to say, I really appreciate hearing Christiane's insights because the, this is a realm of media, with which I am personally not terribly familiar. And I come to it from a different point of view. So just hearing what she had to say about those distinctions and about those nuances was very eyeopening. I really appreciate it.

Likewise, Helen. It's such a pleasure to discuss that with you and not in the typical ghetto and get your deep art historical perspective on it. And thanks so much to Colin for making that happen. Yes.

Thank you, Colin. And for doing the exhibition, which I know was a real labor of love and a very complicated, many, many moving parts, but it came together brilliantly.

Thank you so much, Helen. And thanks for all your guidance and advice through the, through the years and in the project's development. So, all right. Well, I would like to, once again, just thank you both and I will stop our recording now.

Thank you.