The Right to Opacity

The market demands transparency. Every artwork must become legible as price, as provenance, as position in art-historical sequence. The demand masquerades as democratization — make everything visible, accessible, comparable. But what actually transpires is the opposite: the work that has been made fully transparent has been emptied. Rendered into data, its enigma liquidated.

Nonterritorial insists on opacity. Not obscurity, not elitism, not the manufactured mystery of scarcity. Opacity as Glissant understood it: the right not to be reduced. The right of the artwork to remain partly incomprehensible, partly resistant to full explanation, partly other even in the moment of encounter. This is what distinguishes aesthetic experience from information transfer. Information is transparent; it delivers itself and then is finished. The atmospheric is opaque; it touches without explaining, transforms without translating.

What cannot be said can be kept silent through a display of images, Baudrillard wrote. The Cinematic Preview framework operates here — in the space where the work is shown but not exhausted, where the silence of the image resists the noise of commentary, where the felt-body is addressed but not instructed.

This is the secret that seduction requires and that production destroys: the work must retain something that is not given, something that draws the viewer in precisely because it will never be fully possessed.

The blockchain makes certain things radically transparent — who received what payment, where each deployment occurred, the entire genealogy of circulation. This transparency is not contradiction but complement.

What is made transparent is the infrastructure, the plumbing, the mechanics of fair exchange. What remains opaque is the work itself: its atmosphere, its effect on lived space, what it does to the air around it.

The termites wanted everything transparent because transparency enabled speculation—every painting reduced to a number, comparable, tradeable. We make the infrastructure transparent to disable speculation. The work remains opaque because opacity is where aesthetic experience lives. The mystery is not in the price. The mystery is in the encounter.

And that mystery we protect.