jonCates

Visibility, attention, and support are not decentralized. I think this idea that NFTs somehow escaped gatekeeping is one of the biggest myths the space keeps telling itself. It sounds good because blockchain infrastructure is technically open; anyone can mint, anyone can buy, and everything is transparent on-chain. Fine. But visibility is not decentralized. Attention is not decentralized. Support is not decentralized. And those are the things that mostly determine (especially online) who gets to exist culturally. The reality is that NFTs reproduced a lot of the same social structures as the traditional art world almost immediately. A small group of artists became canonized early, collectors clustered around them, platforms amplified them, and then everyone else was told the ecosystem was “open” while competing for scraps of attention in an economy driven almost entirely by visibility algorithms and insider networks. The success rate for artists experimenting natively in NFTs is not radically different from the traditional art world (something I personally have experimented with first in my trad art career because I am Mexican and not in the USA or Europe, and secondly in NFTs because I was late and not doing generative art). We act like this was some mass liberation event for artists, but how many actually built sustainable careers? How many received long-term support? How many got to keep experimenting after the speculative wave cooled off? Very few. The artists who succeeded were largely the ones who were selected early, platformed early, supported by collectors early, or given enough visibility to build communities around themselves. That’s not an insult, it’s just reality. It mirrors traditional art structures much more than people want to admit. In both systems, a very small number of artists are given enough oxygen to continue evolving publicly while most others remain invisible despite producing meaningful work. And I think this obsession with “nativeness” sometimes ignores how much of NFT culture was financially accelerated by speculation rather than by some fundamentally new social model. The transparency argument is interesting technologically, yes, but transparency of transactions doesn’t eliminate power structures. You can see the hierarchy more clearly, but the hierarchy still exists. Maybe even more aggressively because everything becomes publicly quantified. You can literally watch social consensus form in real time around a chosen set of artists and collections. You can watch people chase wallets, mimic buying behavior, perform affiliation, and build prestige loops. That’s not the disappearance of the art world. That’s just a faster and more financialized version of it (which is fine!). And this idea that traditional art is slow and NFTs are somehow more democratic because they circulate faster, I don’t fully buy that either. Fast circulation often benefited speculation more than artistic depth. A lot of artists became trapped producing for velocity, relevance cycles, timelines, floor prices, and engagement. The market rewarded constant visibility, not necessarily sustained artistic thinking. This I would also argue, is one of the biggest problems of our space. One could argue that great gestures take time, not just efficient network distribution. I also think people romanticize “community” in NFTs without acknowledging that communities are often formed around asset performance first and art second. Not always, but often. If prices collapsed, communities frequently disappeared too. That might tell us something important about the underlying structure of our space. What drew myself and many traditional art people into crypto initially wasn’t simply that it was “new.” The art world is constantly exposed to novelty. What was compelling was the temporary feeling that alternative forms of circulation and patronage might emerge. This felt like I was going to skip the gatekeeping I had experienced for being born in the South. But over time, what actually I saw emerged was another status economy with its own elites, its own language, its own institutions, and its own mechanisms of exclusion. Partly why I decided to create the projects I create was because I saw the massive opportunity that existed but that artists would need help to be seen, supported, and collected. NFTs are the most exciting space for contemporary art right now IMO. I fully believe blockchain has meaningful implications for provenance, digital ownership, artist royalties, and online-native cultural forms. But I think we have to stop pretending the ecosystem escaped human behavior or escaped the concentration of power. It didn’t. The same dynamics exist everywhere: a few artists become legible to the market, a few collectors shape discourse, a few platforms dominate visibility, and most artists remain structurally peripheral no matter how “open” the infrastructure is. That’s not failure. That’s just culture. The mistake is pretending that code dissolved it 🤔🫣🥺