Auction 3.0

In October 2022, during Frieze week in London, I sat in Sotheby's evening sale and watched the price of Gerhard Richter's 192 Farben, a grid of small colour squares painted in 1966, climb to 18.3 million pounds within two minutes. The room applauded. Outside the saleroom, the pound was sliding, the crypto market had just collapsed, and the world was still counting the costs of the pandemic. I kept asking myself: which one is the real world I am living in?

When Post Capitalistic Auction premiered in Bergen in 2018, and travelled to Yokohama in 2019, the questions it asked were treated by many as speculative, even naive. A Toronto edition was planned for 2020. Then the pandemic arrived, and for two years the auction, a form that lives on physical presence, on the room, the hammer, and the face of the bidder, became impossible. Live art stood still, as if travelling back to prehistoric times, while value itself seemed to migrate onto screens.

In those same two years, cryptocurrencies and NFTs rose faster than any market in living memory. For a moment, they promised exactly what PCA had been asking for: a way for artists to define the terms of their own value, to be paid directly, to reach their audience without intermediary layers. I followed this development closely and with real hope. But the promise inverted with remarkable speed. The technology that was supposed to empower artists turned into an instrument of speculation, and it has seemed to benefit the financial speculators far more than the artists. When the bubble burst, what was discarded first was, once again, the art. How has the artworld responded? Largely by returning to business as usual, as the applause at Sotheby's confirmed.

And yet I refuse to conclude that the experiment failed. Despite my doubts about NFT art, the underlying idea deserves to be separated from the mania around it. Arriving in 2022, the Toronto edition of PCA is what I would call Auction 3.0. If the traditional auction belongs to the world of ownership and the online auction to the world of access, then an auction built on the logic of web 3.0 should belong to the world of participation. For this edition, I was inspired to consider using blockchain technology and smart contracts, not to price the works, but to enable the online audience to take part in bidding and to secure the non-monetary transactions: to record what was promised, to verify that it happened, and to make an exchange of opportunity, understanding, or labour as binding as a transfer of money. The technology, in other words, serves the agreement; it does not make the judgment.

This also changes the position of the audience. In Toronto, the audience are not spectators of an auction but participants in a value experiment: co-creators of the bids, witnesses of the decisions, and in some cases co-owners of the outcome. Presented in a city and a country now openly debating decolonisation, land, and whose values count, this edition has become, unsurprisingly, the most political and critical one so far. The questions PCA asked in 2018 have not changed. What has changed is the world around them: after the pandemic, after the crypto crash, the question of what holds value when money trembles is no longer speculative. It is the news.