A short line of thought on Artistic Research
There’s a creeping suspicion that we are nearing the final block. Not in the doomsday sense, nor in the tired chorus of "everything’s been done" — but in a more structural, cryptographic one: that art is, and perhaps always has been, a Proof of Work consensus. Each piece, whether a masterstroke or a provocation, functions as a block on a chain — validated by effort, context, and recognition. And slowly, with every mined gesture, the ledger grows.
What if Duchamp’s urinal, Rauschenberg’s erased de Kooning, or Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana were not anomalies, but signs of an emerging exhaustion — or rather, completion — of the conceptual chain? What if Yves Klein’s Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle, where he sold empty space for gold, is not empty at all, but a perfectly mined block: a maximal compression of value, risk, and irreproducibility?
We’ve reached the point where the next valid art transaction must meet extraordinary computational (or conceptual) difficulty to qualify. A man sells nothing and delivers just that. A canvas is signed but not painted. A song is composed of silence. A gallery exhibit consists of locked doors. The effort now lies not in creation but in staking presence, staking belief, staking proof.
The Reduction Drive: Mining for Zero
John Cage's 4′33″ didn’t silence music; it validated ambient noise as music — like a validator confirming a transaction already present in the mempool of experience. Kazimir Malevich’s White on White was not a void, but a final hash of visual reduction: a non-fungible signature on the boundary of perception.
Each reduction carried immense weight. Minimalism, in this sense, was not aesthetic but computational: reducing art to its smallest non-zero value. Artists weren’t simplifying — they were compressing, hashing ideas into minimal, verifiable forms.
To stand in front of a blank canvas titled Untitled or This Is Not a Piece of Art is to verify its legitimacy in the chain of prior acts. It refers back, signs the past, and closes a circuit. The consensus mechanism is psychological, social, historical — and irrevocable once accepted.
Artistic Mining Pools
Just as Bitcoin miners join pools to solve harder blocks, artists have clustered into schools, collectives, and movements to co-sign each other’s proofs. Dada. Fluxus. Conceptualism. Institutional Critique. These were not merely stylistic turns — they were hash functions. New rules for validation. When those rules became too widely accepted, artists moved again — forks in the chain.
Santiago Sierra’s 250 cm line tattooed on 6 paid people is not only art but a direct ledger entry in the body-politic. Jens Haaning’s infamous Take the Money and Run is both fraud and fulfillment — proof of both conceptual effort and material cunning. The theft becomes the piece; the work becomes its own invalidation. This isn’t laziness. It’s the difficulty setting turned up to max.
The Final Block
Imagine: art as a blockchain. Every work a unique, signed node in a distributed ledger of human expression. No central authority. Just trust, effort, verification, memory. Now imagine this ledger nearing its final block. Not because ideas run out, but because the domain of valid novelty has been saturated.
Each time you ask, "Is this still art?", you’re validating the network.
But if the chain reaches its logical completion — the final block mined — what’s next?
The answer may not lie in creating new blocks, but in forking reality. In stepping away from production and toward participation. Not in minting new art, but in running full nodes of aesthetic consciousness. In becoming the network.
Beyond Art: The Fork of Being
If art is a finite proof-of-work chain, then what lies beyond is not more art, but a new consensus mechanism.
Perhaps:
- Proof of Stake: where one's lived attention, not effort, validates beauty.
- Proof of Breath: presence as the unit of value.
- Proof of Encounter: art not as object but as relational event — subtle, unrecorded, real.
Or perhaps we abandon proof altogether. Let the chain halt. Let the ledger rest.
Because once every valid statement has been made, and the last reduction has been verified, all that remains is to live inside the ledger. To let the existing artworks be the fossils of the consciousness that produced them.
And to ask — not what can be made — but what still needs to be felt.
Epilogue: This Essay Was Already Mined
You read it, and in doing so, you validated its block.
There will be others, maybe — but they’ll have to be harder, subtler, more embodied.
Until one day, someone just stands there, saying nothing, doing nothing — and the network stops.
Not with a bang, but with a consensus.
References & Further Reading
- Walter Benjamin – The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)
Benjamin’s concept of “aura” — the unique presence of an artwork in time and space — directly echoes the Proof of Work metaphor. As reproducibility increases, aura decreases, making the original artwork harder to validate. The late conceptual turn in art can be read as an attempt to mine value in increasingly saturated semantic fields. - Jon McCormack, Oliver Bown, et al. – Autonomy, Authenticity, Authorship and Intention in Computer Generated Art (arXiv, 2019)
This paper interrogates the conditions under which computer-generated works can be considered “authentic” or meaningful. The struggle to assign authorship in algorithmic or minimal contexts parallels the artist’s labor to stake a valid, accepted “block” within the ever-hardening chain of contemporary art.
→ arXiv:1903.02166 - Arthur Danto – The Artworld (Journal of Philosophy, 1964)
Danto suggests that art is defined not by intrinsic properties but by its position within the “artworld” — a conceptual ecosystem. This supports the consensus model: it’s the network that confirms the validity of a work, not the work itself. A blank canvas is only art if the network agrees it is. - Kazimir Malevich – The Non-Objective World (1927)
Malevich’s writings on Suprematism describe a systematic reduction of visual language to its final, irreducible forms — echoes of block finality. His White on White is not just a painting but a mining limit: nothing more can be said with less. - Adrian Piper – The Logic of Modernism: Art, Ethics, and the Social Condition
Piper argues that conceptual art is not aesthetic minimalism but ethical maximalism — art becomes proof of internal ethical labor. In this light, even “non-art” is work-intensive and consensus-bound, reasserting the Proof of Work thesis.
→ Found in various academic volumes, e.g., Out of Order, Out of Sight - Rizka Ardiansyah et al. – The Implementation and Analysis of the Proof of Work Consensus in Blockchain (2024)
This technical paper describes the computational difficulty, energy expenditure, and irreversibility of blockchain transactions — a helpful analog to the metaphysical “cost” of staking an artistic gesture in the contemporary landscape.
→ ResearchGate Link - George Dickie – The Institutional Theory of Art
Dickie proposes that an object becomes art when it is presented within the framework of the art institution — again, consensus as validator. This model aligns with the idea that a work’s legitimacy depends not on creation alone, but on community recognition, timing, and historical saturation. - Robert Rauschenberg – Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953)
Not a text but a reference work, this piece literalizes the “mining of absence.” Rauschenberg erased a masterpiece, staking his own authorship through negation — an elegant early block in the chain of conceptual finality.