1653
Taste and capital have always met.
A collector’s judgment could help bring a work into being. Art’s connection to money is not new. What changes is who can recognise it, support it and own it.
Epoch One — The Case
Recognition
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1787
Approval once controlled access.
The Salon concentrated artists, critics and collectors in one room. Its juries did not just judge the work. They shaped which work the public could encounter.
1874
Artists found another way to be seen.
In 1874, the Impressionists organised their own exhibition. They did not wait for the Salon’s approval. Recognition could begin outside the institution.
The 1874 exhibition ↗1890–91
The obvious choices were not always obvious.
Dealers and collectors backed painters whose place in art history was not yet secure. The canon we inherit contains judgments people made before those judgments became conventional.
Durand-Ruel and the Impressionists ↗1917
A definition can become a blind spot.
Duchamp challenged the idea that art had to be made by the artist’s hand. A new kind of work can be difficult to recognise when we judge it only by inherited rules.
1962
Familiarity does not rule out significance.
Warhol brought mass-market imagery into the gallery. An image could be familiar to millions and still become something collectors wanted to own.
1974
The medium is not the verdict.
Paik made the screen an artistic medium. Not every new medium produces important work. But ruling one out in advance can mean missing the work that matters.
2017
Recognition no longer has to begin in a gallery.
Artists publish directly. People encounter, share and identify with the work. CryptoPunks became icons of that participation. Institutions still matter. They no longer have to come first.
CryptoPunks: identity and ownership ↗2018
One token, infinite images.
Copying an image does not transfer its token. A work can reach a vast audience while remaining collectible. Scarcity makes ownership possible; it does not make the work significant.
2021
An audience can arrive before the auction.
Beeple published daily for years before this sale. The practice and its public already existed. But attention alone is not endurance. The question is which work people keep returning to.
NOW
The canon is already being written.
Most work will not enter it. The task is not to collect everything new. It is to recognise the few works that may come to define the era.
Explore Epoch One ↗