THE MIGRATION OF MEANING: Symbol, Life, Ego, and Algorithm in Contemporary Art

Within the highly visible and institutionally rewarded sector of contemporary art, the dominant locus of meaning often migrates from World, through Symbol and Institution, towards Ego and finally Algorithm. A locus is not an object or intrinsic property of a work, but the dominant relation through which that work acquires and maintains significance. The argument begins with the ontology of the philosophical symbol. Art becomes philosophy when a symbol performs an irreducible cognitive act in a form that cannot be replaced by a pro- position without loss. That act remains alive only while the work is answerable to something capable of resisting the maker and exposing the work to failure. When form or theme survives after that confrontation has disappeared, the symbol be- comes a residual symbol: a recognisable configuration whose significance depends chiefly on inherited symbolic language, identity, legitimation, commodity value, or pattern. The resulting Meaning Locus Migration Theory traces this local change across a particular field rather than claiming an exhaustive history of all contemporary art. Duchamp’s Fountain, Basquiat’s market afterlife, and generative AI test successive stages of the theory. Four proximate forces — market incentives, institutional legitimation, the attention economy, and digital capitalism — accelerate the migration, while a deeper asymmetry explains why they succeed: the world is resistant and costly to approach, whereas ego is more readily attributed, packaged, and circulated. Algorithm is the limiting case, a pseudo-referent that organises recognition without being able to answer back. The migration is neither universal nor irreversible. A contemporary counter-example shows that inherited forms and computational systems can still be redirected towards genuine confrontation with the world.