Digital platforms erase the institutional walls separating art from commerce.

Evidence

The art historian Boris Groys understands this flatness as a function of the platform (hence medium) convergence of formerly discrete modes like art, literature, and theater. As he writes, “On the Internet art and literature do not get a fixed, institutional framing, as they did in the analogue-dominated world. Here the factory, there the theatre; here the stock market, there the museum. On the Internet, art and literature operate in the same space as military planning, tourist business, capital flows, and so on; Google shows, among other things, that there are no walls in the space of the Internet.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 436

Categorization

• XREF: Groys’s flatness thesis is the infrastructure behind the immediacy-aesthetic argument — pairs with her Jameson-based read of collapsing mediation; useful for the mediation-defense essay.
• SEED: The ‘no walls’ claim — art sharing space with military planning and capital flows under algorithmic ranking — is a strong spine for an essay on how platform neutrality is a myth.