In the hyper-networked terrain of the New Creative Economies, identity no longer precedes artistic expression but is increasingly performed, pluralised, and platformed; artists like Cibelle Cavalli Bastos and Tabitha Swanson, alongside curators such as Malcolm Levy and designers like Craig Barrow, articulate a shift in which the self is not a stable origin but a negotiated interface, rendered legible across feeds, contracts, and curated universes, a condition exacerbated by the algorithmic gaze and the commodification of presence that social media demands, yet within this fragmented digital choreography emerges a new infrastructure of potential: Web3, particularly through platforms like LUKSO, promises tools not only for showcasing art but for asserting authorship and owning one’s narrative, allowing creators to generate, sell and anchor digital artworks to Universal Profiles, which function as both archives and identity vaults, offering resistance to data extraction and ephemeral virality; this is not merely technical but deeply political, a way to restore agency, provenance, and value in a culture economy where ownership has long been decoupled from creation, and as Malcolm Levy notes, NFTs reintroduce transactable value into formerly unsellable digital practices, rebalancing the art-world hierarchy and creating shared upside across distributed exhibitions like those led by Refraction DAO, where curatorial frameworks are collective, recursive, and economically reciprocal, positioning digital art not as immaterial spectacle but as a site of lived negotiation, where artists retain control over display, royalties, and reputational capital; in this light, identity becomes both subject and medium, with idealised or performative personas enabling deeper engagement and post-gallery intimacy, while also exposing creatives to the fragility of hypervisibility—Swanson’s and Bastos’ reflections make clear that Web3 is not an escape from platform capitalism but a reimagining of how value, labour, and authorship are encoded, demanding active participation, shared governance, and a new literacy in legal, technological, and aesthetic domains; here, art is not just created but continuously co-authored with tools, audiences, and protocols in real time. Digital art now lives where identity, technology, and ownership intersect—Web3 just offers the scaffolding for that negotiation to matter.
