Art as discourse: materiality, power structures, and the digital reconfiguration of authenticity

Abstract The evolution of art from traditional material media to contemporary digital forms reveals historically specific interconnections among discourse, reproduction, and materiality. This study traces art as a historically situated cultural practice shaped by shifting technologies, ideologies, postmodern theory, and institutional conditions. Informed by a Foucauldian account of power–knowledge, it examines how artistic meaning, visibility, cultural legitimacy, and value are organized within different historical formations. As digital technologies expand, blockchain and non-fungible tokens challenge established hierarchies by reconfiguring authenticity, originality, and ownership through mechanisms such as traceable provenance and artificial scarcity. At the same time, these developments are accompanied by new modalities of control, including platform infrastructures and algorithmic governance that influence circulation, attention, and valuation. The resulting tension between dematerialization and re-materialization highlights the ways digital art loosens its dependence on physical substrates while remaining embedded in technical, economic, and institutional arrangements. Overall, debates over the virtual and the actual, the copy and the original, continue to structure contemporary discussions of art and its changing conditions of production and value.