Doctrine
The Mechanism
If the Concept is the divine act, the Covenant is the sacrament that performs it on matter. The Mechanism is how the sacrament actually works.
The Covenant
A CoCA artifact is sold with a covenant — a permanent, unseverable condition that binds every future owner. It is not a warranty or a certificate. It is a change in the object's legal and conceptual status that cannot be reversed.
The covenant runs with the object. It cannot be undone. — CoCA Mission Deck, On the Covenant
In practice the covenant is concrete, not ceremonial: a permanent resale condition — half of every future sale remits to the artist — written into the acquisition document itself. The instrument is drafted, not implied. The Mission publishes the mechanism at the seat.
The Mechanism: the document changes the jurisdiction
The artifact is not transformed by being touched, signed, or displayed. It is transformed by a document. The analogy CoCA uses is baptism: nothing physical changes about the body, yet its standing is permanently altered. So with the artifact — the document changes the jurisdiction. The object now lives under the Church's law, not the market's.
This is why CoCA can say it engineers "conceptual financial instruments" rather than art objects. The instrument is the covenant. The object is merely where the covenant happens to be attached — the readymade context, raised to law.
The Genesis Artifact
The proof is specimen one. The Genesis Artifact is an unlicensed Canal Street Rolex, purchased for $200, permanently encased in archival resin, still ticking — governed by a covenant that runs with the object forever.
It is not a watch. It is a compliance mechanism dressed as a relic. It works the same way a baptism works. The water is ordinary. The document changes the jurisdiction. — The CoCA Mission, 04 / The Mechanism
"We didn't make an object. We changed the jurisdiction." The whole Mechanism, demonstrated in one artifact. The reliquary keeps the record at The Artifacts.
Psychic real estate
Psychic real estate is the territory CoCA actually claims: the space between thoughts, the mental ground a brand occupies. The Law of the Readymade Context (§1.3.4) names Duchamp's Fountain (1917) as the Ur-Sacrament — the founding proof that placing context above the object is itself the artwork.
The act of placing a urinal in a gallery is industrial accident, plumbing supply, or sacrament — depending on the wall text. The wall text is the description. The description is the liturgy. — The Glossary, Vol. II (Anscombe)