Essays
The Artist as Lead
Wang Xin's 10,000 and the Lottery of Discovery
Wang Xin's 2017 installation literalized what the art world prefers to mystify: that artist discovery operates as a lottery, and the artist's value to the system lies not in their work but in their contact information.
The Browser as Readymade
Rafael Rozendaal, Abstract Browsing, MoMA, 2024
MoMA's acquisition of a free browser plugin reveals how museums now collect legitimacy rather than objects. The browser is not just the medium—it is a mirror in which the institution sees its own transformation.
What Is Circulation Criticism?
A Methodology for Art in the Network Era
Circulation criticism does not ask what a work means. It asks how it moves. The critic's task is not interpretation but diagnosis—tracing the pathways through which art acquires value, accumulates legitimacy, and transforms into capital.
The Diffusion Model as Mirror
On AI Image Generation and the Politics of the Training Set
Diffusion models do not create images. They compress and reassemble the visual history of the internet, returning to us a statistical average of everything we have already seen. The output is not imagination—it is memory, averaged and laundered.
On Scarcity Machines
NFTs and the Manufacture of Artificial Rarity
The NFT does not make digital art scarce. It makes scarcity itself the art. The token is a machine for producing rarity where none existed, a technical solution to a problem that was never aesthetic but always economic.