Why it is a question
CLAIM-273 puts contested artworks among dissipative structures for their maintenance. The record’s readings already separate the rungs above that:
- Dissipative, externally held. A Bénard cell is held by a temperature gradient it does nothing to keep up (THEORY-072, from LIT-570).
- Self-maintaining. A candle flame keeps itself above the combustion threshold, vaporizes wax and draws in oxygen. Its macroscopic pattern exerts “at least one ‘top-down’ constraint” on the flow that sustains it (THEORY-072). Bickhard (THEORY-220) counts its contributions as functions for it. It “cannot seek more fuel when the candle is almost gone”.
- Recursively self-maintaining. A system that switches among self-maintaining processes according to its situation (THEORY-220).
For an artwork, the flame’s top-down constraint would be the image itself recruiting or directing its defenders. A recognizable, growing image would draw more placers, and visible damage would draw repair. That is testable. The conditional repair hazard after an overwrite (CASE-079), and whether recruitment rises with an image’s size or recognizability, would show feedback from pattern to flow. If the defenders arrive at a rate fixed by the subreddit’s size, whatever the image does, the artwork is a convection cell. Falmagne et al. find the defenders’ own conduct among the precursors of overthrow (THEORY-214), which suggests the flow is not fixed.
The recursive rung is the coalition’s, not the image’s. Coalitions merge over the event (THEORY-216), and their planners admit or refuse additions and move or redesign images (THEORY-218). Whether that switching is in the service of the coalition’s persistence, and not just its members’ tastes, is the same problem one level up.
The answer bears on CLAIM-280, whose producer would then be self-maintaining or not, and on QUESTION-086. A self-maintaining artwork and a twin held up by an outside crew would behave alike until the crew is withdrawn. CLAIM-194’s warning applies to drawing the artwork’s boundary: the coupling between image and placers does not by itself say whose boundary it is.
Note of 2026-10-13: two routes of feedback, one observed
The owner proposed selective retention: participants stay while their art survives, so surviving art keeps its maintainers (CLAIM-274, which answers this question in part, untested). The readings already show the other route, recruitment. The Mona Lisa group wrote its forum’s URL on the canvas, and within two hours newcomers said they had come because of it (THEORY-218). Both are the image acting on the flow that keeps it, which is the flame’s rung, not the convection cell’s. The test above now has two parts: recruitment after visible growth or damage, and retention as a function of the survival of one’s own pixels.