"Though Lund is responding explicitly to the contemporary art world, there are also readings of this project that apply to the world of crypto writ large. The technology promises—and could provide—a compelling alternative model of financial logic. It can operate outside big banks. It can allow citizens (and non-citizens) to decouple their finances from the state. It can, in theory, increase the privacy of people who use it. But money is money is money, and, for all the promises of subversion, there are still a lot of twentysomething crypto bros with venture-capital backing who are driving leased sports cars around San Francisco and living in “crypto castles.” The decentralization of finances doesn’t necessarily imply that wealth is decentralized, and deregulation certainly doesn’t. As the Times technology writer Mike Isaac recently tweeted, “take all of the enormous wealth and cultural trappings of traditional finance and remove any semblance of regulatory guard rails or ethics watchdogs and you’ve got the wild world of cryptocurrency.”

Lund’s Web site claims that his tokens are “subverting the traditional power structures that inform the contemporary art world.” In a sense that’s true; it’s no longer the shadowy forces of the art market influencing his decisions but a broad group of individuals. When he puts the tokens openly on the market—or goes public, so to speak—anyone will be able to have a say. But Lund is also, in a way, re-creating those power structures by creating financially invested trustees, by offering bounties to Instagrammers, by tying shareholder power to money. The project is performance-art capitalism. As Lund has said, “The ultimate human is a sort of corporation.”

Sophie Haigney, The Artist Who Guides His Art with Crypto-Tokens", The New Yorker