The artwork is inaccurate. Like Ahab, Trump can only be defeated by that which he is symptomatic of. It is also irrelevant: like most everything else these days, the artwork is simply a means to an end. What is for sale here is the new means (blockchains), the new currency (crypto) and the new product (provenance).
"Follow the money," said Deep Throat to Woodward, and that, not surprisingly, was a shadowy path that led to a paranoid U.S. President and "his" administration. But this new path, lit up like the hallways of Lucas's THX 1138 (1971). No more galleries or auction houses, no more state dollars, no more objects; what matters is where you, the buyer, are in relation to the transaction history of a given commodity (artwork): the closer you are to its source, the wiser you appear relative to that commodity's increased value. "History has just been made," packaged and sold -- as provenance.
Is this finance's version of relational aesthetics? As Julian Stallabrass reminded us in Art Incorporated (2004), the art world doesn't parallel the business world -- it is the business world ("The art world is bound to the economy as tightly as Ahab to the white whale").
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