I’m at SOMA Summer again this year as an artist mentor and leading a seminar on my research. It’s also just the best place to be. 

Details on the whole summer schedule here: http://somamexico.org/es/soma-summer/program-2019-#panel5

January 24, 2019: Equity by Platform: The Artist’s Contract (1971) to Smart Contracts: In 1971 conceptual art curator-publisher Seth Siegelaub and lawyer Robert Projansky created The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, a legal contract envisioned as a standard tool enabling artists to retain ongoing property and economic rights in their sold works. In Siegelaub’s view, the efficacy of “Artist’s Contract” was ensured by its promise of seamless transactions executed automatically by virtue of its standard form. However, the Contract has been little-used and remains controversial, particularly for stipulating an artist’s resale royalty, and demanding transparency in resales. Today however, many emerging blockchain-based platforms for selling art employ smart contracts with terms similar to the Artist’s Contract. Here, resale royalties are not taboo, but are encouraged, and smart contracts are celebrated for their intrinsic automation and self enforcement – as if achieving the Artist’s Contract’s initial dream. Yet as uses of smart contracts and blockchain within the art market proliferate, we might pause to consider the criticisms and limitations of this historical precedent in order to more fully imagine the potentials of these technologies. It is only then that we can assess the implications of these platforms for equity in the art market, and their greatest contradiction: adopting tools of private law in order to effect collective good.