A constellation of enterprising ideas about art and artifact collections.
I have a more likely theory (maybe I should actually ask a curator why): they get recruited to those positions because they are good storytellers. They craft and relate narratives around institutions, around objects, around exhibitions that inspire curiosity and devotion among donors and earn loyalty from those around them.
Not to lose out to NFTs, two recent headline-grabbing events will push those of us who work with art and artifacts to refine our relationship to technology: the valuation of Masterworks at $1 billion and the use of artificial intelligence by Swiss company Art Recognition in the authentication process of a Peter Paul Reubens painting at the National Gallery in London.
The speculative concept involves only shipping objects one-way and thus cutting transportation in half. In other words, you leave your objects wherever you loan them and store the objects in the nearest storage facility that meets your standards. You dispense with the idea that they return to a “home” institution immediately.
If we acknowledge that it is safer for an object to remain at its institution, then why do we loan it to other institutions? If we acknowledge that it is more environmentally sustainable for an object to remain at its institution, then why do we loan it to other institutions? If we acknowledge that it is cheaper not to borrow objects for exhibitions, then why do we borrow it at great expense?
The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed widespread suffering on people, labor, and budgets around the world for well over a year now. Amidst all the friction between seemingly binary choices, it has also sparked some creative fires in our art and artifact wilderness that appear to acknowledge that this extraordinary moment aligns economic incentives with sustainability practices like a summer solstice on a clear day at Stonehenge.
![Savings and [Distributed] Loans](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b818890297114b18b5c6121/ec15f8d5-866e-4556-9dde-4494eb09b974/Distributed+Model.png)
![Savings and [Decentralized] Loans](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b818890297114b18b5c6121/1647254062984-PX9MHSNR1WDT1IKS5O3B/Decentralized+Model.png)
