# The Art Availability Layer *(Originally written for 1OF1's editorial, February 2024)* By [ScriptedFantasy](https://paragraph.com/@scriptedfantasy) · 2024-11-12 --- The data availability layer has been all the rage as of late. But what about the art availability layer? While the space’s combined activities and achievements have been remarkable, to my knowledge we have not seen an easy-to-use tool to sort through contextual information on artists and artworks, exhibitions, publications, reviews, general discourse, and so forth. The space has infinite interesting stories to tell, yet we have no efficient mechanism to sort through them. Could this be the result of a general overfocus on individual works, and an imbalance between publishing and archiving? One of my favorite artists is Piet Mondrian. His painting helped me understand the term “oeuvre”: the achievements of an artistic life that are more than the sum of its parts. Most of you will know Mondrian for his paintings of black lines and colored rectangles. Fewer will know that he started out painting naturalistic still lifes and landscapes. The isolated work, while beautiful, only tells a limited story. What is most interesting about Mondrian is how he went from Wood with Beech Trees to Composition II. I’ll leave it to the reader to dig into details here but I can promise that viewing his trajectory from one to the other is a mind-blowing experience. One will find a stringent, multi-decade progression towards the abstract - the development of a true artistic vision. ![editorialSubImage](https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/of1website.appspot.com/o/Editorial%2FEditorial%20Images%2FMondrian.jpg?alt=media&token=8350b078-fb41-49cb-912f-a5d23007a8b6) Measuring artistic achievements in decades and not weeks stands somewhat at odds with how we look at most work in the digital landscape. Most user experience is centered around the individual piece. In result, we usually aggregate information about an artist manually by scrolling through half a dozen webpages and spending copious amounts of time on X to miss none of the discourse. With the wealth and transparency of information in our space, I feel like this could be optimized. What if we pulled the artist into focus, rather than the individual work? Artist centric design would likely yield more contextual information and would give collectors and enthusiasts a much more comprehensive overview and understanding of what they are looking at. Making a vast variety of information contextual to an artist's oeuvre easily accessible, could help the space embrace the long arch of artistic development. Publishing as a value driver shouldn’t be underestimated either. “An exhibition that was not published didn’t happen in 10 years time” was told to us by the great Pamela Joyner, who through her activist collecting style remains one of the driving forces behind the rightful inclusion of many POC artists in countless American institutions. Through her continuous efforts she helps to offer new, more inclusive readings of art history and uncovers what had previously been ignored. She made publishing about shows and artists an integral part of her activities. Only by nurturing meaningful stories do they not get swept away in the ocean of information. Durability directly correlates to diligent archiving of equally diligent publishing, which ultimately carries an artistic position through time. The longer it’s carried, the more lindy it gets. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is the Mona Lisa because many more people know about her than have seen her. In a way, the work is even more of a feat in publishing, than painting. A quick search through Google Books yields millions upon millions of results that refer to Mona Lisa, all of which contribute to her lindy effect. So where is the Dapp that allows me to sort through information on art in the digital age and enshrines all of it on-chain? I imagine a product where I can type in Ix Shells and get the aggregate information about all works across her various contracts, minted and possibly unminted, all exhibitions and projects, and all the important bits of discussion. I want an overview of off-space, gallery and museum shows, publication histories, critical writing, event participations, award honors, philanthropic contributions, commissions, partnerships and collaborations, screenings, talks, X spaces, and so forth. A tool like this would not just facilitate further understanding of our space and its artists but also greatly contribute to the lindy effect of the important cultural milestones that come from it. Simply aggregating tweets around specific pieces and grouping them by artists could provide another metaphorical 50 shades of color to an oeuvre. This tool could quickly become the center of our space. The most successful marketplace in 5 years time might not be a marketplace at all, but an archive with a marketplace attached to it. Chain-agnostic of course. “Information wants to be free” goes the old hacker trope. It turns out that information mostly wants to be stored, sorted and not forgotten. --- *Originally published on [ScriptedFantasy](https://paragraph.com/@scriptedfantasy/the-art-availability-layer)*