Archives des algorithmic mediators - Gilles Vallée Art

Cultural Stewards

Two black-and-white checkerboard spheres dotted with colorful squares, evoking circulation and cultural diversity.

Read this article in French:
Qui fabriquera la reconnaissance culturelle et artistique demain ?

You log on.
You ask a search engine to name some internationally recognized artists.
An AI-generated overview suggests several names, grouped by artistic field.

But who decided that these artists were recognized?

For a long time, this recognition was largely shaped and transmitted by different mediators: museums, galleries, critics, curators, publishers, universities, media organizations, and other cultural institutions.

Painting, sculpture, literature, poetry, music, theatre, cinema: among all the works created in these fields, some have been recognized and passed on by these stewards. By preserving, publishing, exhibiting, interpreting, or studying them, they have also contributed to their longevity.

Today, other stewards have joined them: search engines, platforms, recommendation systems, and artificial intelligence. Without replacing institutions, they are participating in a new ecosystem of recognition.

Today, a work can have little presence within institutions and yet be encountered by millions of people in our global networked culture. It can be searched for, shared, cited, and continually recirculated.

Is that enough to call it recognition?

Not necessarily. A work can go viral on the Web and then disappear. Popularity, circulation, recognition, and longevity are not the same thing.

Time, however, can have an impact. If a work continues to be encountered, transmitted, and rediscovered over the years, its circulation can contribute to its recognition and longevity.

This phenomenon is not new. From Leonardo da Vinci to Van Gogh, from Baudelaire to Rimbaud, works continue to endure because generations of stewards have preserved, studied, published, exhibited, or transmitted them.

And behind this circulation, there are not only algorithms. There are also people. Their searches, publications, links, citations, and encounters leave traces that new mediators can, in turn, organize and bring to our attention. Search engines and AI systems can suggest a work. But without a human encounter, there will be no one to recognize it, transmit it, and contribute to its longevity.

Tomorrow, institutions, audiences, and new stewards will probably participate together in shaping cultural and artistic recognition.

Stewards may change.
Technologies may change.
But a culture remains alive only if people continue to share it.

📚 See All Micro-essays

This text is part of the Understanding Today’s Culture series, a chronicle of our global networked culture.

→ Return to the Micro-essays page

Explore Further

🟦 Why Do Some Human Traces Endure Through Time?

🟦 Why Do We Still Need Artists?

🟦 The Horizon of Circulation

🟦 The Use of AI in Art: Beyond Creation, the Algorithms Organizing Global Culture

Works, Ideas and Knowledge: The Stewards of Cultural Continuity

Two sunflowers in a vase, one yellow and inspired by Van Gogh, the other transformed into a black-and-white checkerboard pattern.

Read this article in French:
Pourquoi certaines traces humaines traversent-elles le temps ?

A scene from everyday life:

You log on.
You run a search.
You are shown a painting by Vincent van Gogh.

You encounter a work created more than a century ago, without going to a museum and without ever seeing the original.

But this story is not just about painting.

A poem, a novel, a song, a film, a photograph, an idea or a piece of knowledge can also travel across generations.

How do they reach us?

And why do some of these human traces continue to circulate while others disappear?

Van Gogh’s story offers us a clue.

Van Gogh left behind paintings, drawings and letters. Traces.

His brother Theo supported him and helped preserve these traces. After both brothers died, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo’s widow, played a crucial role in preserving, exhibiting and bringing Vincent’s work to public attention.

Then others took over.

Collectors, art dealers, museums, researchers, teachers and publishers. Later came photographers, filmmakers and television. Then the Internet, search engines, platforms and, today, artificial intelligence.

All became, in their own way, mediators.

Stewards.

Through them, the traces left by Van Gogh continued their journey, encountering new people generation after generation.

The journey can be summarized as follows:

Traces → Mediators → Horizon of Circulation → Effective Circulation → Longevity

A broader horizon of circulation, however, does not guarantee that a work will endure through time. It simply opens up more possible paths.

And preserving a work may not be enough to ensure its cultural longevity.

A work can lie dormant in an archive for decades. It still exists, but no one encounters it.

Preservation allows a trace to survive. Circulation and encounters allow it to remain alive in culture.

Perhaps this is what longevity means: not a state achieved once and for all, but a process. A work is rediscovered, viewed, studied, discussed, reproduced, transmitted and then put back into circulation.

Each generation receives traces from the past and passes some of them on to the next.

We, too, are stewards.

Perhaps cultural longevity is, above all, a succession of human encounters across time.