On the day ignorance stopped being an excuse By: Jeff Kluge · AI Ethicist & Tech Strategist · Writes about what it costs to stop paying attention The art world has always understood something that the broader economy is only now being forced to confront. Value is not created by extraction. It is destroyed by it. Every serious collector, every auction house specialist, every wealth manager who has built a practice around cultural assets understands this at a visceral level. A work stripped of...

Standards, Smart Contracts, and Peter Blake: Marianne Magnin on the Future of Art Infrastructure Why is the art world the only global industry that treats “standardization” like a four-letter word? In today’s episode, I’m sitting down with Marianne Magnin, a strategist who grew up in the “magic potion” of a creative family but spent her career building the high-level corporate toolboxes that make global markets work. As the driving force behind the Art Identification Standard (AIS), she’s...

By Jeff Kluge Featuring Callum Hale-Thomson (First Thursday) In the spring of 2026, the art market is caught in a paradox. While the "Great Wealth Transfer" is minting a new generation of collectors, the infrastructure supporting them is still running on 19th-century logic. In this episode of Talking Art, I sat down with Callum Hale-Thomson, the founder of First Thursday, to discuss why the "Black Book" era is over and how AI is finally filling the "Infrastructure Gap." The "Squeezed Middle"...