Paper short abstract:

Our contribution examines how Western, classed and gendered imaginaries of digital and blockchain platform entrepreneurship both circumscribe and enable the ways in which visual artists in Ghana make a living and imagine their future.

Paper long abstract:

Our contribution examines how Western, classed and gendered imaginaries of platform entrepreneurship both circumscribe and enable the ways in which visual artists in Ghana make a living and imagine their future. Drawing on participant observation of and 30 in-depth interviews with visual artists living and working in Accra, we focus, in particular, on examining how Ghanaian visual artists negotiate the scope, boundaries and the identities implied in the imaginaries of frictionless, democratic, global, and readily accessible digital labour marketplaces, as well as the metaphors of decentralized and meritocratic blockchain-based NFT art marketplaces. We address both the intrinsic coloniality and the potential liberatory valence of such imaginaries as they coincide with the rapidly raising, yet achingly belated, aesthetic interest of the traditional global art markets in contemporary African art, and especially in figurative black body painting, which has as of late been subjected to skyrocketing, if insidious, economic speculation and accelerated financialization.