Draft:Decentralized art

Decentralized art makes use of blockchain technology, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), smart contracts, and encryption to transparently define concept and origin, to securely sell and distribute artworks, track provenance, and build communities that cross geography, class, and culture.

Decentralized art is dematerialized, non fungible, and immutable, with encoded, built-in authentication. The artworks tend to be digital, but can also be analog, physical, or hybrid, across all artistic media.

As a movement, decentralized art distributes and locates conception, production, control, and equity outside of central authority, with artists as its source nodes.

This ethos connects to broader themes of decentralization in crypto-centered art communities since the advent of Bitcoin, through to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and related web3 technology and culture.

Decentralized art is connected to current and past art movements, including conceptual art, mail art, digital art, street art, punk, dada, pop art, land art, and social practice, along with art groups that include the Situationists, Surrealists, and Fluxus.

Background
Although the first use of “decentralized art” is currently sourced to 2006, the concept of decentralization and operating outside the bounds and norms of of centralized power in the art world was an ongoing theme of the avant-garde in 20th century art movements.

Origins of the term “decentralized art"
In 2006, Artpool, an art research center in Budapest, Hungary, created an exhibition and project titled The Decentralized Art and the World, featuring mail art and the use of network technology of the time to collaborate and connect decentralized art practice across many countries and artists.

Following the creation of Bitcoin and advent of blockchain technology in 2008, concepts of decentralization began to slowly proliferate worldwide. That same year, New York Magazine described NYC artist Poster Boy’s defaced posters as an effort to start a “decentralized art movement", an early notation of street art as a type of decentralized art.

In 2011, Lane Rely, an art professor at Northwestern University, wrote about conceptual art of the 1960s as a “decentralized art world” privileging secondary over primary information. In the same year, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight described a “decentralized art scene” in Los Angeles that reflected the global art world.

In May of 2014, the first known NFT (non-fungible token) was created in New York City by artist Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash, an early start connecting the concepts of decentralized art with contemporary blockchain technology. Later in 2014, a Bitcoin Magazine article provided examples of “decentralized art”, including graffiti and other art projects.

2018 marked the birth of the term “NFT” as part of the Cryptokitties digital collectibles, using a non-fungible token standard on Ethereum called ERC-721. This project and others like it paved the way for art to be more decentralized, certified as limited editions on the blockchain, with public tracking of sales and transfers.

In 2022, Chanel Verdult curated a collection of artworks for MoCDA's “decentralized art residency”. That same year, artist and curator Eileen Isagon Skyers wrote a Frieze article titled New Perspectives in Decentralized Art.

In April 2024, the TXT art collective published a definition of decentralized art as a type of artwork and movement, using the term to define art works in their Antonym exhibition. It was also used in the title of a related project, The Artist’s Contract for Decentralized Art, created as an update to the The Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement of 1971.

Alternative terms
Alternative names for this type of art include "crypto art" or "NFT", with some confusion, also tension over which term is more appropriate, as the nascent field evolves.

There are cryptographers who take issue with the word “crypto” and what it should represent, known as the crypto naming controversy, which in turn may complicate the term “crypto art”.

Some analysis meanwhile argues that an NFT is only the “certificate of ownership and authenticity, not the artwork itself”, whereas decentralized art aims to embody and define the total work of art.