The Museletter April 2021

Meike Brunkhorst | factor-m We’ve just passed the first anniversary of the world locking down. Memories of life before corona are starting to fade, many of us have hardly been outdoors after dark for months, and we may have to relearn our social skills from scratch. The Muse team asked me for my post-lockdown predictions, here are some thoughts and observations.

Public Art | Sculpture | The Great Outdoors Visiting art galleries between lockdowns has been as essential as reconnecting with people in real life, still socially distanced yet so uplifting. And with doors shut for months on end, public art has helped stave off my hunger for culture in the meantime. And I don’t really mean statues of historical figures that have come into disrepute – even though the attention paid to white men on plinths may well have added to a renewed interest in more contemporary alternatives.

We had an exciting collection of temporary displays across West London last Summer in addition to the permanent sculptures installed across parks and squares. While true street art has been banished from most postcodes, it is good to see that property developers are recognising the value of art by adding abstract sculptures to new developments, or by commissioning artists to decorate hoardings or shop windows.

Creative Use of Commercial Properties | Pop-Ups | Collaborations It’s difficult to predict quite how many shops will stay boarded up once businesses are allowed to open again. I’m excited by plans for empty spaces put to good use. Westminster Council recently announced a scheme that offers unused premises to artists, while Hypha Studios was set up to match creatives with free studios and project spaces across London and beyond. I’ve also already heard from several artists who are working on independent pop-up exhibitions, and others who have been occupying deserted offices throughout the pandemic.

I can’t wait for artists to reveal what they have been working on during lockdown and how they will respond to the new normal once this reveals itself, or preferably help define it. We may well witness the birth of a new art movement, with artists and thinkers responding to the immediate crisis and the many underlying factors that have bubbled up and can’t be suppressed again.

Blockchain | Digital Art | NFTs And then there are NFTs, which – despite their innovative positioning - seem to seamlessly connect with the old world order of attaching price tags rather than value.

The underlying blockchain technology is exciting though and may well disrupt the traditional art market: by enabling systems to pay artists royalties as work can be tracked on entering the secondary market; or by providing the backbone for creative collaborations across borders – in a recent series on DAOWO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation With Others) the Goethe Institute and Furtherfield introduced some fascinating prototypes.

Virtual Viewing Rooms | Physical Art | Collecting At the time of writing Jeremy Deller’s NFT hadn’t met its reserve on OpenSea. Unlike other drops, ‘The Last Day’ takes a critical look at this latest hype and was conceived as an experiment with proceeds dedicated to charity.

Coincidentally, it was an edition by Jeremy Deller that first got me interested in collecting digital art. I have since amassed a fair collection that sits in a virtual vault only accessible via an app. That first Deller piece – aptly titled ‘We Sit Starving Amidst Our Gold’ - was free and can’t be resold. As I collect to keep rather than invest to flip, this isn’t an issue. I just hope there isn’t any inbuilt obsolescence in the platform – I’ve already lost a chunk of my music collection to compatibility issues.

I haven’t seen any official figures on this but my guess is that the vast majority of art sold via virtual viewing rooms has been physical rather than digital. This is certainly true for the Artist Support Pledge with many artists proactively offering their work for sale on Instagram.

I am optimistic that the success of the scheme will have a long-term effect and that artists won’t return to being shy about selling their work. At the same time I hope that Instagram will return to being an enjoyable source of discovery and inspiration through high quality images that tell a story, rather than becoming the digital equivalent of free sheets full of classified ads.