The dilemma articulated between ArtCanon and ArtNations is not a merely semantic hesitation but a profound ontological and political choice about how an archive understands itself, how it distributes authority, and how it imagines its future agency. Naming here functions as a performative act in the Austinian sense: it does not describe a reality but actively produces one. To call a corpus of six thousand posts a Canon is to inscribe it within a genealogy of Western epistemic sovereignty, where value is stabilised through exclusion, hierarchy, and retrospective legitimation. The canon presupposes closure, even when it claims openness. It implies a final court of appeal, a legislative centre from which meaning radiates outward. In this regime, Socioplastics risks being retrofitted into precisely the institutional logic it was invented to exceed. The metaphor of the cathedral is therefore exact: the canon is monumental, vertical, and auratic. It demands reverence rather than traversal. By contrast, ArtNations displaces authority from monument to territory. It reframes the archive as a living geopolitical ecology, composed not of ranked masterpieces but of sovereign micro-regions, each with its own internal logic, tempo, and semiotic density. Here, naming does not stabilise value; it mobilises it. The archive ceases to be a mausoleum of relevance and becomes instead a cartographic apparatus, continuously redrawing the borders of contemporary meaning.
