The artist is famous enough for the new pieces he talks about in the presentation to matter only in the opaquely valued portfolio of his persona. His sharp awareness of this fact stops through an heroic effort almost entirely short of perceiving his constant struggle to escape the quicksand of success as a necessary element of the pattern he's trying to avoid. On the true drivers of this furiously stagnant movement his hypotheses are fluctuating but never correct.
The audience of the presentation is sitting in a careful arrangement of space and power. The structural analogy of this arrangement to Dante's moral architecture is accidental and easier to intuit than to describe. The room the artist is sitting in belongs to a freeport that has seamlessly occupied the physical, legal, and reputational carcass of a financially collapsing museum. Only the wealthy and their infrastructures of comfort are present. Everybody below them in the logarithmic scales of influence is watching the presentation through pedestrian remote access tools vestigial to the former museum's forgotten mandate.
A third group is that of the truly wealthy. They can be defined as those who, if needed, would find the purchase of a freeport as easy as using the services of one. They are watching the presentation remotely as well. Their remote access tools are infinitely more sophisticated in their ability to display every nuance of the artist while effortlessly removing any indication of an audience.
Degrees of wealth determine not only categories of physical and sensorial luxury but also well-gated levels of information. This is often confused with understanding. The people sitting in the room with the artist can see on their expensive glasses small texts and images carefully curated and adjusted to their knowledge profiles to make them able to later maximize their social leverage of their presence at the event. People not rich enough to be gifted this prepackaged understanding are relegated to real-time comment forums and the dubious analytical powers of artificial intelligences. The truly wealthy see the artist's presentation as an easily silenced side note to summaries of the ubiquitously intrusive surveillance of the artist's psychological difficulties and the way they constrain his artistic output to a superficially diverse path within the narrow valley of the freeport patron's interests through the increasingly experienced abilities of a repurposed military psyops team.
The impact of this control on the net present value of the artist's unrealized portfolio is large but irrelevant. It is the process itself and its wider potential what carries the interest of those financing the experiment. The controllability of intelligent software extended to the scarce human resources still necessary for truly transformative scientific and cultural developments would offer those with the necessary resources a way to accelerate societal movement along economically and politically desirable lines. No awareness must be assumed in them, sharp or otherwise, of the tedious and narrow antiquity of those desires under a thin gloss of frenetic change.