This is indeed a milestone, to see Rutherford's work represented among a proto-canon of systems art.
His art taps into the core structures of its subject matter. In the case of CENTS, it embodies not only the nature of the transformation that Bitcoin performs, but the shift in value from the physical to the digital, from the solid to the abstract, that defines the current epoch.
Adina Glickstein recently pointed out in an article about Beeple at Node, "Post-Bretton Woods as much as post-internet, hasn't contemporary art become, if not exactly a commercial product, the financial instrument par excellence?". I couldn't help but be struck by how the existence of CENTS is an embodiment of this fundamental shift in value that is still impacting culture at every level (if you're unfamiliar with it, #wtfhappenedin1971 is a good resource). Unlike Beeple though, Rutherford's art doesn't portray, it incorporates the market into the art itself, using it as a force for performing the conceptual gesture of continually transforming the definition of what "one Cent" is. He achieves the strange and somewhat taboo artistic sublimity that people dance around when seeking to reconcile the history of art objects with their ambiguous present and their indeterminate future.
As Wattlington notes here in Art in America, "The most galvanizing systems art doesn’t just diagram or demystify the machine—it cracks it open and hands you a wrench.” CENTS takes on the task of cracking open the vast machine of value and circulation. It is indeed not a diagram of that system, but a living process where decentralized participants hold the wrench.
Rutherford Chang's work sits at the crux of multiple cultural currents, and as artistic and market sensibilities shift into the territory it occupies, it only becomes more relevant.