Who decides what gives art value? For a long time, the answer seemed obvious. Museums, galleries, critics, and collectors shaped the hierarchies that determined artistic relevance. Today, those institutions increasingly compete with social media platforms, algorithms, and online audiences. Attention has become a currency of its own, and the ways in which value is produced are changing.
Swedish artist Jonas Lund has spent much of his career making those systems visible. His works use algorithms, blockchain, AI agents, and distributed decision-making not simply as technologies but as ways of examining how artistic value is constructed. Projects such as The Fear of Missing Out, the Jonas Lund Token, and Performance Review question who gets to decide what matters, and whether those decisions can be delegated, automated, or made transparent.
In this conversation with Anika Meier for SLEEK, Jonas Lund discusses why he believes attention has overtaken institutions as the dominant mechanism of value production, why social media has reshaped the art world, what he learned from trying to hack its systems, and why, despite recurring claims about its demise, art itself is not coming to an end.
Anika Meier Jonas, how do you define value in the art world?
Jonas Lund What interests me is how value gets produced. The art world’s hierarchical power structure produces value very differently from a small project space around the corner. If you think of the art world as a unified system, where a relatively small group of influential people drives the discourse around what’s valuable and what’s relevant, that’s one model of value production. There are many different kinds of value, both in the art world and in life. Yet, especially in recent years, the only value people seem to care about is market value. I watched Hito Steyerl on Joshua Citarella’s Doomscroll podcast the other day. They were talking about whether the art world, at least as we’ve known it, is basically over. Maybe they’re right. Maybe art really is over in the age of AI slop.
AM If we look at Andrea Fraser’s essay The Field of Contemporary Art in e-flux (2024), she describes five intersecting subfields of the contemporary art world. The academic subfield produces knowledge, the exhibition subfield experience, the art-market subfield value, community-based subfields community, and the field of cultural activism social change. What I find interesting is what’s missing. Writing in 2024, she doesn’t really account for social media. Social media has blurred these distinctions while at the same time creating entirely new systems of value.
JL It’s a mistake to think of the art world as one homogeneous entity. It isn’t. There are many different art worlds. The NFT and crypto space is one. The European institutional art world is another. And that’s very different from the American institutional art world because they operate according to different principles. Take museums in the US. To get a solo show at a major institution, you basically have to be represented by one of a handful of galleries. There’s very little public funding, so galleries effectively underwrite the system. The last figures I saw suggested that around five galleries accounted for roughly 85 percent of institutional solo shows in the US.
The classic model of value production is the institutional theory of art: art is what the art world says it is. It can make the whole system look circular, even corrupt. That’s partly what the Jonas Lund Token was about. The higher you are in the hierarchy, the more influence you have over deciding what’s good or bad, relevant or irrelevant, valuable or not. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think that model has been disrupted over the past few years by social media, NFTs, and new actors entering the market. Museums are slowly losing some of their authority as the ultimate producers of value. At the same time, I don’t think the art world is particularly good at changing. It’s a very fixed system. I don’t think it’s about to be fundamentally disrupted.
What has changed is the metric. Attention has become the real currency, the real mechanism of value production, rather than the older institutional structures. You can feel it. Everyone can. Beeple is a good example. The more followers you have, the more engagement you get, the more valuable you become. The same is true for someone like KAWS, or other artists who aren’t necessarily the most interesting but have enormous audiences.
AM If art isn’t over, what is it that’s coming to an end?
JL Art is not over. It’s never over because people want to make things. What I’m talking about is the established way the art world produces value. It’s not disappearing, but it’s becoming harder to justify its exclusive position in cultural production. No other cultural field works like this. The art world wraps itself in a veil of importance, a veil of complicated language. Either you’re on the inside or you’re not. Either you get it or you don’t. It’s not for the masses. Compare that to music. If the music industry worked like the art world, it would be absurd. Maybe the art world is simply becoming more like other cultural fields. But that’s threatening for collectors, institutions, and galleries because it disrupts their position and their power. The system depends on maintaining a distinction between insiders and outsiders. That’s why I’ve always thought of it as fundamentally corrupt. Maybe the reason it feels like something is ending is simply the sheer quantity of things being produced. You spend two minutes on TikTok or Instagram and think, “Oh my God.” It’s becoming harder and harder to grasp what’s actually going on. At the same time, we’re living through overlapping crises, and that changes the way all of this feels.
AM As an artist, do you think you need to compete with what’s happening on social media?
JL I’m in a fortunate position. If you’re a young artist just graduating and trying to find an audience, it’s both more accessible and less accessible than it used to be. It’s more accessible because you can build your own audience. If you have an audience, if you have fans, you have much more agency over your career instead of relying on curators, galleries, and selling work through that system.
AM Going back to the Jonas Lund Token, you mentioned NFTs as a different segment of the art world with its own value system. I remember the first time we talked about it in 2018, when you made me download a MetaMask wallet. Why the Jonas Lund Token, and how does it work?
JL The basic idea is that you buy voting rights in my artistic practice. It’s an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain with a fixed supply of 100,000 tokens. It launched in 2018, and over time, more and more people have joined the system. The project grew out of something I mentioned earlier: the way value is produced in the art world. Following the institutional theory of art, art is whatever the art world says it is. The people at the top of that hierarchy have the greatest influence over what’s relevant, what’s valuable, and what’s important. With the token, I submit proposals to the board, and the board votes. They decide things like what a work should look like or which direction a project should take, and I execute the outcome. The more influential the people on the board are, the more their decisions reinforce the value of the work. It becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
In that sense, the Jonas Lund Token was my ultimate solution to the problem of value production. At the same time, it grew out of years of trying to quantify this elusive thing we call value in the art world. I kept asking whether there was a way to measure relevance or importance beyond subjective opinion. I don’t think there is. The data is incomplete. You never know what happens behind closed doors, who’s talking to whom, or which collectors sit on which boards. There isn’t a reliable way to quantify value. The token also makes that lack of consensus visible. Today, there are around 250 board members, and there are almost as many opinions about what’s good as there are people on the board. The interesting question is when, if ever, those subjective opinions become consensus. Of course, it was also a hack to advance my own career.
AM You tried to hack the art world, but in the end, you realized it can’t really be hacked.
JL I reached that conclusion quite early. Even with The Fear of Missing Out in 2013, where I made a show based on an algorithm that generated instructions for making art, I realized the magic of art was precisely that it resisted quantification. You couldn’t use big data to arrive at a formula for making successful art. Today, I think you probably can quantify success, but not through the work itself. It’s about the network around the work. How do you position it on social media? How do you talk about it? Who is connected to it? Those things can absolutely be manipulated. What still can’t be quantified is the work itself. That became obvious during the process-based abstraction boom, when auction houses were full of paintings that all looked more or less the same. Why was one worth so much more than another? The Jonas Lund Token was the endpoint of that line of inquiry. Instead of pretending value could be measured objectively, I built a distributed, decentralized board that makes those judgments transparently and on the record. The question became: Who decides what’s important, and why?
AM Do you still ask the board for advice and hand over decision-making to them?
JL It’s a bit dormant at the moment, mainly because I haven’t had the time. Consulting a board takes work.
AM Who’s on it?
JL Hans Ulrich Obrist, for example. You’re on the board. It’s a mix of artists, curators, collectors, and museum directors. These days, I only consult the board on major decisions. You’re asking for people’s time and attention, and if participation is low, the whole process loses its meaning. You need enough people to vote for the outcome to carry any weight. I also realized the incentive model was never fully implemented. The idea was that token holders would benefit as my career became more successful because the value of the token would increase. The missing piece was an automatic pricing algorithm that would adjust the token’s value according to observable metrics in my career. Ultimately, it should function like an open market, almost like a prediction market or a consensus engine. But I also realized that every proposal meant four times as much work. Much of my practice has been about removing myself from the decision-making process by delegating it to an algorithm, a system, a set of rules, an AI agent, or a board. Lately, though, I’ve started to feel comfortable making the decisions myself. It’s much easier than building an entire protocol around every decision.
AM During our panel about autonomy before and after AI agents at the Digital Art Summit in Basel in June, someone called you lazy.
JL They did. And I quoted Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, who said he’s “lazy like a fox.” That’s the classic programmer mindset. Laziness isn’t about avoiding work. It’s about optimization. If you have to do something a thousand times, do you repeat it manually, or do you write a script that does it for you? That’s basically the core idea behind everything I do. I love building small programs that automate a single task so I don’t have to do it again. That’s the promise of the computer: let it do the work.
AM Your most recent exhibition at Office Impart in Berlin was also about giving up control. Performance Review opened with an empty gallery, and an AI agent directed the production of the exhibition. What interested you about working that way?
JL Performance Review started with an empty gallery. Contract workers carried out tasks assigned by an AI agent. The agent would prompt them to make a painting or another work, then evaluate the result and decide whether it should be approved, revised, or discarded. Based on that evaluation, I decided whether to sign it. It became a kind of factory, or a studio run by an AI. Part of the motivation was practical. I didn’t have as much time as usual to produce a solo show, so I made an exhibition that produced its own work. I’d actually done something similar before, in Studio Practice in 2014, except then the instructions came from me rather than an AI. More generally, I’ve always been interested in building systems that can run with as little input from me as possible while still producing good work. It’s this fantasy of having a studio practice that more or less runs itself. Maybe it’s the Jeff Koons dream: you go to the studio, people are making work, and everything functions as a system. What I like about art is that moment of slight confusion, when you look at something and think, “What is this?” An AI agent can introduce that kind of surprise into the production process. It becomes a structured source of randomness that can still produce something unexpected.
AM Were you surprised by what the agent produced? The system still depended on human input. Collectors could submit requests, which the AI turned into works.
JL Yes. Collectors could submit requests, and the agent translated them into structured instructions for the contract workers.
Was I surprised? Yes and no. It’s always interesting to see how things turn out, but the results were also what I expected from a first iteration. Without much human guidance, AI agents tend to produce slop. If I really wanted to push the work further, I would have to use the AI as a tool for my own ideas rather than letting it drive the process.
At the same time, the parts that worked were exciting because they pointed to where things might be heading. The AI agent evaluated every contract worker after each session and generated a performance review that determined whether they would be scheduled again. That’s a pretty dystopian model, but it’s also not far from the reality of platform work. If you’re an Uber driver and your ratings drop, you can lose access to the platform. The exhibition simply made that logic visible.
AM Your agent also emailed people. I got invitations from it.
JL Exactly. Once you have an AI agent like that, you can give it a press list, ask it to research each person, write a personalized invitation, and send it to hundreds or even thousands of people. I think we’re heading towards the dead internet theory actually becoming true. The idea that everything online is made by bots. Already, more than half of the internet is AI-generated. Soon it might be more or less everything, and then almost nothing human remains. I’ve been using the word slop a lot, in different contexts. Maybe it sounds like I’m calling everything that’s bad slop. But there’s so much talk about slop now, about this kind of slopification.
AM You’ve also talked about good and bad. Do those categories still make sense? Is that how people still judge art?
JL I don’t think that binary is very useful anymore. The same goes for ideas like relevance or market value. None of those metrics really tell you much. The only question that still matters to me is: Does the work do something to you? Does it make you feel something or think differently? Maybe that’s all that’s left. I’m also quite self-indulgent in that sense. What I optimize for in my practice is whether I’m entertained, challenged, and having fun while making the work. That’s the only thing I can really control. Everything else—whether the work gets attention, becomes valuable, or is recognized as important—is up to other people. Of course, I still make judgments while I’m working. You constantly evaluate what you’re making. Is it bad? Is it good enough? Could it be better? It’s a spectrum. But when you walk through Art Basel, most works aren’t even bad. They just don’t do anything. They don’t hold your attention. Maybe that’s what slop is.
During our panel in Basel, I jokingly introduced myself as the CEO of Jonas Lund Studios, but also the CFO, CTO, COO, Head of Marketing, intern, and assistant. That’s basically what it means to be an artist. You have to do everything. You make the work, contextualize it, promote it, send invoices, and answer emails. You do the whole stack. Now there’s another full-time job on top of that: getting attention. Being good at social media is a skill in itself.
AM I actually teach that.
JL You do?
AM At the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in the Digital Art Department.
JL That’s the logic of the attention economy. Everything is quantified. Everything is optimized. The algorithm coaches you on how to present your work, and success gets reduced to a single metric: views, likes, and engagement. All the other dimensions disappear. I’ve always been obsessed with metrics. Earlier in my career, it was Artfacts. I genuinely believed that if I could improve my Artfacts ranking, my career would improve too. In a way, it did, because exhibition history tells you something. But today I’m not sure those metrics matter anymore. Value has shifted somewhere else.
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