Manifesto of the triad

Have you ever thought about the fact that the artist is the only participant in the art market for whom silence about the fate of their work is a loss — and the only one who stays silent? Unfortunately, this is not something the community talks about.

When an artist sells a work, they hand over a physical object and walk away. The buyer receives the piece — sometimes a paper certificate, sometimes nothing but an invoice. From that point, the work lives its own life: resold, passed from hand to hand, its history dissolving — the artist, as a rule, knows nothing of this. Years later, proving its authenticity requires an expert appraisal: expensive, slow, and grounded in the expert’s reputation rather than in fact.

Diagnosis

The art market operates like any market, but it doesn’t merely satisfy demand. It produces it and thereby shapes what can be called “art.” A gallery invests in institutional placements for an artist: museum shows, biennales, residencies. This generates legitimacy. Legitimacy generates collector interest. Interest generates price. Price generates media attention. Media attention generates new buyers who believe they are responding to quality — when in fact they are responding to a constructed signal. It is a convenient production scheme, but it looks more like the production of content.

After Duchamp, anything can formally be called art. The market accepted this and began putting it to use: if the criterion of quality is blurred, value is determined by attention. And attention, in the media age, is a reproducible, scalable product. Hence the overflow: too many artists, too many galleries, too many fairs — the competition is not for authenticity of practice but for visibility; scandal and provocation as instruments of attention, not as part of the work.

Institutions in this system are structured so that following demand is the least risky strategy. Market infrastructure does not shape taste arbitrarily — it legitimizes what has already accumulated enough attention. This means the hierarchy of “who counts as a recognized artist” is built not through the quality of practice but through the management of visibility. Expertise is marginal in this logic — it is slow, it asks inconvenient questions, and it does not scale.

The artist occupies a strange position in this system. They are the source of all value and simultaneously the least informed participant in the secondary market for their own work. They may not know where their work is now, how many times it has been resold, whether it has been correctly attributed. This is not the artist’s fault, nor the gallery’s. It is an architectural feature of a market built so that transparency benefits no one — except the artist.

I didn’t come to this out of principle or to fix a system. I simply started to care — about who owns my work next, whether it will still be verifiably mine in ten years, whether that can be confirmed without expert appraisal or anyone’s word. It turned out to be a personal question with a systemic answer.

The proposal

Every physical work I release exists as a triad: the object, an embedded NFC chip, and an NFT token on the blockchain. Three elements — one indivisible conceptual object. The physical work is primary. The chip serves as a verification instrument, the token is the object’s digital passport — not an end in itself. And each subsequent resale returns a share to the artist automatically, without negotiation.

Anyone can hold a smartphone to the work and receive public confirmation of its authenticity — without an expert, without an intermediary. Attempting to detach the chip from the work destroys it physically. Attempting to sell the work outside the system strips it of its verifiable status — not legally, but conceptually and reputationally. The triad cannot be faked: the chip generates a unique cryptographic signature on every scan that cannot be reproduced. This is a fact embedded in the object. In a system where everything rests on the reputation of intermediaries, this is a meaningful distinction. For the first time, authenticity can be read publicly.

The artist’s role

For a long time, the artist existed in the image of someone outside the practical world. The one who creates, not the one who manages. This image is convenient for the system: it removes from the artist responsibility for the economic dimension of their practice — and simultaneously removes their leverage.

The contemporary artist is an economic subject, whether they want to be or not. Their work is an asset that lives through time, changes hands, builds reputation. Asking questions about provenance, demanding verifiability of one’s own work, understanding the mechanics of the market — this is not pragmatism at the expense of art. This is the artist’s position. An artist who doesn’t take that position gives it to someone else.

When an artist begins asking what happens to their work, not only practice changes. Position changes. They stop being a source of content and become an author in the full sense: someone who bears responsibility for an object through time, not only at the moment of creation.

For the collector, this also changes something. A work with verifiable provenance is a different asset, because it is clearer: what it is, whose it is, and whether it is real. The collector interacts with the artist directly, and through that understands both the person and the practice better.

When the token is passed off as the work and the physical object becomes a pretext for its existence — the sign displaces the thing. I move in the opposite direction, because I refuse the substitution.

On institutions

Galleries, museums, and fairs shape the environment in which art exists, and for that reason bear some responsibility for which questions get asked within it. If an artist doesn’t know that verification tools exist — that is, in part, an institutional failure.

An institution that educates artists and collectors on provenance and authenticity does not lose its position — it strengthens it. Trust in the market benefits everyone who participates in it. And if institutions follow demand, then this is a conversation artists need to start first.

This manifesto is not so much an accusation as an invitation — including to those who have platforms, audiences, and authority.

The question of what happens to a work after it is sold is not technical and not legal. It is a question of whether the artist considers themselves an author or merely a maker. I consider myself an author.

flux, 2026