The Hypermediated State and Fakewhale’s Practice in Spotlight

Curation today exists in a hypermediated state – simultaneously pervasive and ephemeral, infrastructural yet unstable. If the historical role of the curator was once tied to preservation and exhibition-making – which is still true today within institutional and museological practices – today’s (independent) curatorial strategies operate in an expanded field where art-making and curation blur into a digital choreography of bottom-up visibility and circulation. As physical spaces for unmediated artistic encounters shrink, screens dominate as the primary zones of negotiation, where the digital surface, rather than the exhibition space, dictates the conditions of engagement. The diminishing role of physical exhibition spaces points to a shifting dynamic between the original and its copy – one now rooted in timing rather than place. Increasingly, the version of an artwork or exhibition that a viewer encounters first becomes perceived as the “original.” This reversal introduces a paradox in which reproductions generate their own authority, giving rise to a new cult of visibility. It’s a model shaped by the demands of global art platforms and fueled by the urge to be both seen and searchable in an increasingly digital, interconnected art world. 

Fakewhale emerges as an operative model for the contemporary curator, navigating the tension between blockchain-enabled decentralization and the hyper-curated logic of digital visibility. As a platform that actively engages with artists in a fluid, Web3-native context, Fakewhale deconstructs traditional notions of curatorial authority and redistributes it across an interconnected network of digital creators, collectors, and participants through Fakewhale Gallery and LOG. Here, curation becomes less about passive selection and more about the strategic engineering of aesthetic and conceptual flows – constructing a digital ecology where artworks are not just exhibited but networked, and algorithmically in flux. 

This shift challenges the institutional logic of artistic validation. The museum, the gallery, the fair, the biennial – all sites of legitimization – now contend with an alternative framework in which visibility is contingent on circulation rather than static display. Fakewhale’s approach signals an inversion of the curatorial act: artworks emerge within an evolving infrastructure of attention, their significance shaped as much by interactions and algorithmic amplifications as by curatorial intent. In this sense, curation itself becomes a process of modulation, a continuous intervention into the digital dynamics of perception and reception.