JONAS LUND: WHAT DOES BEING AN ARTIST MEAN?

Jonas Lund: I never really wanted to become an artist; it just happened because I kept making art and I kept being invited to participate in shows. My personal goal with making art, and what my practice is truly optimized for, is to continue learning new things and being challenged with new problems or solutions.

JL: Being an artist means that you’re an artist. It has nothing to do with the art market. Of course, as your career develops, you have to relate to the market, but that usually happens after you’re already an artist. I think this line of thinking is a very typical American-centric one, that success is only measured through an artist's performance in the art market. But there are so many different ways of thinking about success and what being an artist means, and success in the art market is only one of those metrics.

JL: It’s a pretty elusive thing, but what I really enjoy, and would ascribe a lot of value to, is the moment in which you discover a new artwork, and you don’t exactly know what’s going on. There’s a moment of confusion, of insecurity. What is it? What does it do? Is there a trick? And then maybe you’ll get an a-ha moment, and it all clicks into place, or maybe not, but it’s the moment of discovery, of confusion, of excitement that matters and creates the lasting value.

JL: Value in the art world is produced by the art world in a beautifully circular arrangement based on the institutional theory of art – art is art because the art world says it’s art, so by extension, this institution, "the art world," also decides what’s valuable and important and what is not. The art world consists of all the typical players: collectors, dealers, curators, directors, writers, auctioneers, and artists, and the higher up you are in the hierarchy, the more influence you have to determine what’s important and what should be platformed, mediated, and circulated in the art world.

I’ve been exploring that system from many different angles, like in FOMO, where I wrote an algorithm to create instructions for how to make successful works of art, exploring different value-creating formulas; to the Jonas Lund Token, where I’ve distributed shares in my practice to ‘hedge’ the decision making process with representatives from the art world.

One of the many findings is that it’s very difficult, probably impossible, to quantify value in any meaningful way beyond market value, which is also what makes art truly magical. The impossibility of finding a definitive formula for what makes an artwork good, bad, great, or fantastic, is one of the few things left that can’t be hyper-optimized and quantified by automatic processes.

JL: Over the last 10 years, a lot has changed, but at the same time, it’s more or less all the same. In terms of the art world dynamic, it’s pretty much unchanged. Sure, trends come and go, but the underlying structure is the same. Business as usual.

From a broader perspective, my feeling is that pretty much everything is worse today compared to ten years ago, but that’s probably completely incorrect from an objective point of view, but the feeling is there. The Earth is on fire, inflation is at an all-time high, there are ongoing wars, supply-chain disasters, fires, and floods, and it's difficult to find hope for a better future, but we keep going!

JL: Part of the exploration in the piece is what type of value is included in the idea of 'most valuable’, most valuable in terms of formalistic ideals? Which is the most valuable in terms of monetary value? Which is the most valuable in terms of popularity? To me, the most valuable painting right now is a piece from 2017, featuring a pink elephant, so it’s also a question of when something goes from being personally the most valuable to me to being recognized as such by a larger network/audience. When does the value proposition switch from a subjective personal one to a globally recognized one?

JL: It’s always fascinating to observe people’s choices, because the choices that seem so obvious to me are not the obvious choices for someone else, so one size does not fit all in that sense. I think overall, I didn’t expect that the circular pieces would be such a popular choice.

JL: I don’t think NFTs are democratizing much; it’s simply just another way of distributing work and facilitating sales. Artists could sell their works to collectors directly before, but it was frowned upon by their gallerists.

Conflating the crypto art market into one singular thing also feels kind of impractical as there are so many different facets to it. Compare the market on the Tezos blockchain versus the Ethereum one, for example, and you get two very different markets.

I think overall the crypto art market and the global art market are largely the same, but they have some important differences. The crypto market is faster, it’s instantly global, it’s rapidly growing, it has introduced a new class of collectors, there’s a lot more artist-to-artist support in terms of collecting, artists are also more easily introduced to collecting, the barrier of entry is lower, the average quality of works is typically lower, and there’s much less curation, just to name a few.

JL: The initial text of the piece describes the motivation as follows: "Lund is interested in subverting the traditional power structures that inform the contemporary art world and the process of making the correct strategic decisions for each given situation. The distributed advisory board, with an incentive to further strengthen the position of the artist, as it has a direct connection to the value of the Jonas Lund Token, aims to increase the efficiency of the decision DAOs, decentralization, and Web3 making process and make each strategic decision count," which I think is still totally on point. Overall, I’m interested in emerging technologies, so it felt like an accurate approach to explore distributed decision-making.

Following the logic of the value production mechanisms from above, "art is art because the art world says it’s art," a distributed decentralized advisory board consisting of art world representatives making decisions about my work is a perfectly hedged setup. Because the board members are art world representatives, the value creators, whatever they decide automatically becomes the correct decision in a circular self-fulfilling prophecy kind of setup, essentially making all the decisions hedged: "the art world says it’s good".

JL: No, not yet, because I'm still the majority shareholder, but as more JLT is distributed, I hope to lose more control.

JL: That proposal wasn’t submitted by me but by a concerned JLT board member (anyone with more than 100 JLTs can submit proposals to the board), who thought it would be good for me to take a break. I thought it was not a good idea to take a sabbatical. The timing was really off, and no new work for half a year felt very harsh. It was a very close vote, but luckily the no-sabbatical option won out in the end.

JL: Animals are more or less the opposite of humans. You know how in action movies you mostly don’t care when human actors get injured, but if an animal gets hurt it’s awful, terrible, and very disturbing? That’s kind of the logic of the animals in the JLT universe. They are representatives of core values, each animal having a long history of symbolism attached to it, and as animal symbols, they are far removed from the complexities of the human condition, but rather they are beacons of hope, clarity, and clear positions.

JL: An open-world exploration game including many different exhibitions, animals, places to discover, things to do, and people to visit.