From Ownership to Experience

The art market is not broken. It is functioning as designed —concentrating wealth, manufacturing scarcity, transforming cultural objects into financial instruments. The problem is the design itself.

Nonterritorial does not propose to fix the market. It proposes to exit it. To replace ownership with experience. Not "usership" in the Silicon Valley sense—temporary access while corporations retain control. Something closer to ‘experienceship’: the recognition that art's value lies in encounter, not possession. That a painting seen is more culturally alive than a painting stored. That circulation creates meaning; accumulation extinguishes it.

The ridiculous figures must go. Not because wealth is inherently wrong, but because the numbers have become the entire conversation. Sixty-seven million for a Van Gogh tells us nothing about Van Gogh, nothing about painting, nothing about why any of it matters. It tells us only that someone had sixty-seven million and chose to spend it. This is not cultural information. This is financial gossip.