A New Era of the Visual Art Market? : A Platform Analysis of the biggest NFT market OpenSea on Diversity and Equality

Abstract: The thesis investigates OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace on whether it promotes the decentralization of the visual art market and lowers the entry barriers of the market for artists to connect with potential collectors and thus promoting diversity and equality to the market.  The success of an artistic career requires connections with art dealers and high cultural institutions, because art professionals act as the gatekeepers of the art market by evaluating the value of artworks and artists (Prinz, 2022). It has long been criticized that the gatekeepers highly favour white men and are inclined to promote west- ern culture instead of other culture, causing the lack of diversity and equality in the art market (Glauser et al., 2020). Even with the promotion of digital democracy due to the advancement of Internet, the high cultural institutions were still unenthusiastic in changing the current unspoken rules of networking (Habelsberger and Bhansing, 2021), until the emergence of NFT. Because of its high accessibility and digital ownership, NFT is likely to lower the barrier of participating in the art market. Therefore, this study investigates the case of the biggest NFT marketplace OpenSea to analyse whether it enables a more diverse and equal art world by Platform Analysis introduced by van Dijck (2013). Moreover, artists were interviewed to further investigate their user experiences and their views on whether NFT brought advantages to their career. The results reveal that OpenSea still upholds the value of winner-take-all and hierarchy with its ranking and verification system. It tends to favour experienced artists or artists who have influences on social media. Therefore, OpenSea is a business-oriented platform with great improvements on diversity and equality. Further research concerning different actors such as art curators, collectors and the role of NFT in the high-end art market is suggested to be conducted.