Money, Algorithms, and the Question of Value

In October 2018, the whole world was shocked when Banksy destroyed his own painting the moment it was sold at Sotheby's for 1.4 million dollars. Half a year earlier, at the premiere of Post Capitalistic Auction in Bergen, something structurally similar had already taken place, except that it was a bidder, not the artist, who proposed the destruction. One bidder offered, for a work on paper by Toril Johannessen, to destroy the physical work, and then to spend fifteen minutes every day, for the rest of his life, reading aloud the phonetic words printed on it, so that the work would go on existing in his voice and his time instead of on paper. The artist accepted, and the bid became a binding transaction. Even before the premiere, the artist Anders Jonsson had asked me, half joking, what would happen if someone bid to burn his work.

I am often asked where the idea came from. It goes back to a casual conversation with my cousin when I was an 18-year-old freshman, which ended with me asking: why do artworks end up in the hands of the rich? Why isn't it people who really understand art and artists who own their work? Why does money decide everything? His silence and indulgent smile told me that everyone had already agreed on the answer. By repeating this story again and again, I have become more and more aware that what struck me then was not the art market as such, but the totality of a value system in which no other currency was even conceivable.

Growing up in Beijing, I watched China produce billionaires overnight, and I watched the media rank universities by the number of billionaires among their alumni, as if this were the most natural measure of a school's worth. In the capitalist West the logic is the same, only older and better dressed. As Henri Neuendorf, a journalist at artnet Berlin, observes, some participants in the art market are certainly in it purely for the money. And regardless of who is buying, in an auction environment it is always and only money that talks, in an exchange where artists have no voice.

Since the Bergen premiere, I have been reading widely around these questions: Paul Mason on post-capitalism, Kevin Kelly on the inevitable trends of technology, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger on data capitalism, Yuval Noah Harari's lessons for this century. Meanwhile the world kept supplying material. Google puts museum collections online; the new rich of Silicon Valley explore blockchain; the selfie enters Tate. Information technology is reshaping how art is accessed, owned, and judged, and with it the question of value returns in a new form.

Data alone decides nothing; it is the algorithm that turns data into judgment. Whoever writes the algorithm writes the values into it, usually without ever declaring them. And the frontier keeps moving: futurologists warn that genetic technology may one day dissolve even the last equality we hold, the equality of everyone before death. If the ability to extend life becomes a commodity, the question of why money decides everything stops being a question about art. The design of technical and social systems always carries assumptions about what counts, and those assumptions are being written now, mostly by money.

Post Capitalistic Auction is a real auction in which money, opportunity, exchange, and understanding are equal currencies. The bids are binding, the transactions are real, and the artists themselves decide whose offer wins. The auction does not simulate an alternative value system; for one evening, it operates one, and everyone present, bidder, artist, panellist, or audience, has to make their decisions inside it.

Bringing PCA to Yokohama places the experiment in a context where art, design, and technology have long been intertwined, and where the relationship between craft, market, and innovation has its own deep history. I am curious what this ecology will make of the mechanism, and what the mechanism will reveal about it.

Making a work of art is like watching one's ideas grow a body and start to act in the world. Whatever else this auction produces, I have come to believe one thing: the moment one stops taking for granted the idea that money rules everything, the change has already started.