Ready-Made Token

The ready-made token is a unique — though totally liquid — ERC20 token sold at auction on the Ethereum blockchain. Its name and form — a non-sensitive artwork — draws a continuity with the Dada program: granting a sacredness to a random commodity through the performative gesture of an artist. The ready-made token turns a cryptographic unit of value into an artwork the same way Duchamp elevated a common object to the status of artwork.

The creation of the ready-made token has been a long linguistic and semantic trick questioning the arcane of the contemporary art world and market. Indeed, the ready-made token has been signed under the name of Richard Prince. But no material connection has ever been made between this Richard Prince — the one signing the ready-made token — and the Richard Prince everyone knows for his appropriation art.

This hazardous mismatch has drawn a lot of attention towards the ready-made token, showing how tightly the mechanisms of value production in the art worlds are connected to « linguistic games » and attribution logics. The well known american artist Richard Prince ended up trapped in this homonymy game: he got invited to the prestigious Rare Digital Art Festival, in New-York, to introduce the ready-made token.