Art on the Blockchain – Whitney Hart in Conversation with Valérie C. Whitacre

Valérie C. Whitacre (left) and Whitney Hart (right)
This interview has been written and shared by Lund Humphries.

VW: Whitney, it’s been a truly transformative experience writing this book with you at my side. Its framework would not be nearly so robust without the discussions we had throughout. So thank you for having this last one on the record.

Before we talk about the book itself, I think we should start from the beginning… Tell me about your introduction to blockchain technology in the art world? What made you most passionate about the technology and its impact?

WH: It’s been a pleasure discussing the book architecture and its contents with you throughout your writing journey. I always love this question because everyone has such a different journey to our niche of art on the blockchain.

I didn’t come to blockchain through tech culture; I came to it through art history. While writing my master’s thesis on Walter De Maria, I was deeply immersed in Fluxus-era questions around authorship, process, and the role of the viewer.

At the same moment, I was exposed to Pak’s NFT sales at Sotheby’s in spring 2021, which sparked conversations around Pak’s merge and burn mechanics. Those works immediately struck me as a twenty-first-century reactivation of Fluxus principles: the artwork as an evolving system rather than a static object, and the audience as a co-producer rather than a passive viewer.

What made me passionate wasn’t blockchain as infrastructure, but blockchain as a cultural tool. For the first time in decades, artists had a native medium capable of encoding participation, time, and consequence directly into the work itself.

That realization reframed blockchain for me not as a market innovation, but as a structural shift in how art can be authored, experienced, and lived with. What about you – how did you first encounter blockchain in the art world, and what has sustained your interest in this space?

VW: I actually experienced a similar colliding of worlds! I was a career art dealer with what I now realise was an extremely narrow view. Of course the exposure and access that role gave me was enviable but I’ve never been shy about saying how object-collector focused I was. It probably didn’t help that most companies I worked with were allergic to tech.

I discovered blockchain technology as a potential solution to a wave of fake photographs that had come to market during Covid-19 which I had been investigating. Needless to say I quickly fell down the rabbit hole in the way that type-A personalities like the two of us do – with no goal or direction… just sheer, fervent curiosity. The result was an entirely new career trajectory and of course, eventually, the journey of writing this book.

WH: I love that your story starts with very concrete, practical problems the art world has wrestled with for decades — questions of trust, authorship, and verification — and then unfolds somewhere entirely unexpected, driven by your curiosity. Reflecting on your journey writing this book, is there a specific section that sparked your curiosity the most as you were writing it?

VW: Oh wow, probably more than I could rattle off here. I’d say my biggest revelation during the writing process was the importance of telling the distinct histories that led up to the NFT boom; not because they are entirely different but because their audiences are so disparate and for such a short book to have the most impact, I felt it had to speak to different readers.

As you often reminded me, it was equally important to include as many projects and artist’s stories as I could within such a short space. What about you? In the midst of all my writing madness was there something that impacted your perspective on the space or your role in it?

WH: Looking back on that period, which was about eight months ago now, Chapter Two still stands out forme. That chapter explains the mechanics of blockchain itself and unpacks the accompanying jargon. It feels like we went through endless rewrites of that chapter in an effort to simplify without losing accuracy.

And while the difficulty and exclusionary nature of the technology has long been a conversation within the space, trying to put it clearly into words on the page made that reality hit much harder. It sharpened my awareness of how much work still needs to be done to lower the barrier to entry, and pushed me to think more critically about my role, not just operating within the ecosystem, but helping translate it, slow it down, and make it legible to people who are curious but not technically fluent.

It’s hard to believe we wrapped the book in August 2025 – it feels far more recent. Since then, the space has continued to evolve quickly. What’s caught your attention over the last few months; any highlights to note?

Third World: The Bottom Dimension © Serpentine. Photo: Hugo Glendinning

VW: Well, unfortunately some of the biggest headlines have focused on closures and downsizing. The closure of Christie’s standalone digital art department in September 2025 was certainly big news. I was disappointed to hear it as that headline itself indicated a retreat from the digital art landscape.

But we’ve seen this pattern of retreat and resurgence with other artistic genres such as photography. During economic downturns, it’s not uncommon for these departments to be absorbed into Post-war Contemporary, Design or other departments. If anything, its commercial malleability is an indicator of broader recognition.

WH: That’s a great call-out — I was also disappointed to hear about Christie’s. And now in January we’ve seen further closures of prominent digital art platforms Nifty Gateway and Rodeo, while Foundation has been transferred to new ownership without a clear roadmap for the future. It’s definitely been a tough eight months across the broader art landscape. What about on the positive side?

VW: The main highlight for me was last November’s Paris Photo. As a former photography dealer, I’ve been going to the fair for nearly two decades. The fair’s inclusion of its first digital sector in 2022 reflected my personal history with photography as a long subjugated medium.

Last year’s fair was sophisticated,sincere and at times challenging. I especially admired Heft gallery’s Illuminating Dark Days group show, which not only included names from the traditional photography canon but which chose to provocatively challenge the issues you brought up previously – authorship, process and the role of the viewer.

WH: For me, two moments from 2025 really stood out. First was the opening of Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms at the Toledo Museum of Art in July, which coincided almost exactly with the final stages of ouredits. It was a genuinely thoughtful, museum-level engagement with algorithmic and generative art thattraced clear lineages from early code-based practice to the present.

The institution invested seriously indisplay and installation and, in my view, successfully resisted the temptation to default to screens-as-spectacle. It was a pleasure to see that level of care applied to this work. The other highlight was Zero10 at Art Basel Miami Beach in December. The energy there felt distinctly different from the surrounding object-centric booths of the “traditional” fair.

Notably, the artists we represent in every booth and actively engaging with visitors. There was a real sense of camaraderie, withartists, gallerists, and community members stepping in to help contextualize the work and explain why it matters. That kind of openness and collective effort is something you do not often see elsewhere in the market.