What if some of the most consequential engineering in the arts has been financial? Since at least the workshops of the Quattrocento—where materials science, geometry, labor organization, and patronage jointly structured cultural production—systems of finance have quietly shaped what counts as art, who produces it, and how value circulates. From classical patronage to auction markets, vertically integrated production companies, and today’s platform economies, financial engineering has repeatedly redefined creative fields while remaining largely backgrounded in their histories.
I am interested in what might be revealed by locating historical patterns embedded in these systems of production and exchange, and in how emerging tools such as machine learning might help bring those patterns into focus.
Mike Maizels is Executive Director of the DeCenter, Princeton University’s interdisciplinary blockchain research initiative, where he works across computer science, economics, policy, and the creative industries. Alongside this role, he maintains a scholarly and critical practice focused on the history of creative markets and the institutional, legal, and financial infrastructures through which culture is produced, valued, and circulated.
Trained as an art historian, Maizels has written extensively on the intersections of art, finance, and cultural production. His recent work includes “A Museum for Graffiti and a Beachhead for Cuisine” (Journal of Postmodern Culture, 2026), “Arakawa: A Case Study in Collective Forgetting” (Cultural Politics, 2025), and The Best Art in the World (Anthem Press, 2025), a compendium of criticism published on Whitehot’s twentieth anniversary.
Before joining Princeton, Maizels held academic appointments including Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Wellesley College, Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas, and Affiliate at Harvard’s metaLAB. He has also held senior research roles in the blockchain and financial-technology sector and advised venture-backed startups at the intersection of culture and decentralized finance, including Adim-a16z, Beat World, and Sumeria Labs. He holds a PhD from the University of Virginia and an MBA from MIT Sloan.
His current research applies machine-learning methods to broaden the empirical foundations of the argument advanced in his monograph Collecting the Now (Daedalus Award finalist), which identified tax fraud through museum donation as a formative “big bang” in the modern and contemporary art market.