DEAR MOCA: How Do You Bring New Artists Into the Museum
In so many words...
Please enjoy today’s DEAR MOCA column. Have questions you’d like answered? Have a thought you want us to respond to? Email us at hello@museumofcryptoart.com or submit your questions to our dedicated Google Form.
Dear M○C△,
You probably have answered this a million times…but what are your criteria for integrating new artists into M○C△?
Sincerely,
Artistic Attributes
Dear Artistic Attributes,
What a great question. In fact, we do not get asked this question very often. And like with everything else, I’m going to provide both a literal answer and a more generalized, theoretical answer. I think the conversation I’d to have today is an extension of what I spoke about when answering Culturally Inquisitive’s question two weeks ago, which was “Is it possible for M○C△ to host collections of NFTs that have tied to them significant cultural value?”
That question inspired questions in me of
“What does it mean to have cultural value in crypto art?”
and
“How does a crypto art museum thus navigate its role as a steward of cultural value?”
Yours is a little bit different, not only because it concerns M○C△ singularly, but because it gives me an opportunity to talk about why M○C△ itself —meaning, like, the actual half-dozen-or-so members of the M○C△ team— aren’t actually the best decision-makers when it comes to, like, what we bring into our museum. Because crypto art is a multinodal, and ideally-decentralized art movement. If we’re to actually represent the values inherent in crypto art, it’s vital that M○C△ divests itself as much decision-making power as possible, handing it to our community instead, and that includes how we integrate new artists into M○C△’s various collections.
It’s important to note that, between the internal M○C△ team and the rest of crypto art, there’s a disconnect concerning the pieces in our collections. This might be a transference of what we expect from museums generally. We trust, for example, that the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, India will encapsulate the best and most important works from the Indian modernist movements. The curators are the experts after all, and wouldn’t their opinion count for more than the layperson?
Meh, not really.
Or perhaps ours is a nomenclatural issue. I mean M○C△ has this Genesis Collection, and that word —Genesis— is so thematically loaded. Everything in crypto-at-large revolves around being first. And that adds immense value to an artist’s genesis artwork, or the genesis minting on a given platform; anything that proves a precedent takes on immense value. The first four pieces minted on SuperRare were Videdrome’s AI Generated Nude Portraits, followed by 12 XCOPY artworks and a Hackatao piece. Is there any doubt that being so early on such an important platform played a part in propelling these artists into the upper echelons of crypto art royalty?
The thought behind M○C△’s Genesis Collection, was that it would represent a snapshot of artists who were minting on the blockchain before December 2020, after which artists flooded into crypto art and fundamentally changed the landscape of what had before been insanely niche. That’s it. We never meant to suggest that these artworks are the best representations of an artist’s oeuvre, and they often are not.
But beyond representing a collection of people at a place and time, what does being first even really matter? If I ask you what Michelangelo created first, The David or The Sistine Chapel, would you know? Does it matter? Does anyone have top-of-mind the first works by Dalí or Warhol or Kusama? I think we would universally agree that artists like Picasso or Monet only became more skilled, more shrewd, more evocatively themselves in their later works. And this applies basically to every other art form too. Toni Morrison’s greatest works, in my opinion —The Song of Solomon and Beloved— were her 3rd and 5th novels. My all-time favorite novel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ 100 Years of Solitude, was his 2nd novel, sure, but he had spent more than a decade at that point writing novellas and short stories. Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band was The Beatles’ 8th studio album. Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, Greta Gerwig all became better at making movies the further their careers marched on. That’s not to say that older stuff is always better, but this obsession we have in crypto art with things being first, well it’s somewhat arbitrary. A unique quality of the crypto world, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect highest quality, and it certainly doesn’t capture evolution, which I think most artists would point to as high priority.
So M○C△’s Genesis Collection, while it is probably the part of M○C△ most people most exalt, is limited in both purpose and ability. It literally just captures a moment in time; it’s a tool of historical preservation. We’ve integrated other artists into the museum otherwise through, for example, a massive Daïmalyad donation, but the artists therein weren’t chosen by us; we didn’t sort through Daïm’s collection and say “We want this, this, and this.” We’ve accepted smaller donations here and there for a host of different reasons, but we don’t really have a given criteria for accepting works by new artists because, simply, that shouldn’t be up to us.
Meaning we have neither the knowhow nor the exposure to accurately gauge what’s important or revolutionary in crypto art as it continuously evolves. Each of us working at M○C△ may have our own opinions about quality or significance, but we’re just a few individual minds. Crypto art’s continuing narrative cannot and should not be controlled by just a small smattering of perspectives. This is a me —Max Cohen— opinion and does not reflect M○C△ at-large, but, for example, I absolutely despise what Vincent van Dough did in bringing together 50 of the highest-selling, most-Twitter-followed crypto artists together under the “Art of the Millenium” brand. I mean what hubris, what a complete abdication of crypto art’s decentralized, anti-gatekeeping, change-centric value systems, and from someone who has been collecting crypto art for so long no less! I’ve absolutely had it with people who care more about making a buck than advancing the spirit of this art movement. For that reason alone (amongst many more), I admire M○C△ for continuing to deny easy money-making opportunities so as to safeguard the interests of crypto art itself.
So to release or even mentally hold some kind of single rubric for integrating artists into the Museum, doesn’t that seem just as gatekeep-y and self-absorbed as these half-assed galleries and shows that give themselves huge pats on the back for “curating” a selection of only the most proven and currently-notorious artists? To keep crypto art’s values front-of-mind means limiting one’s own power and one’s own selectivity.
We do that predominantly via our Community Collection, though I do not believe the general crypto art public does not respect the legitimacy of this collection the way we do internally. Because to us at M○C△, the Community Collection is our greatest collection-based achievement. It’s the museum but without the museum’s input. The community itself gets to add any pieces they like to the M○C△’s holdings, whenever they want! We have no say (beyond our own contributions), and no limiting ability. We have 9285 pieces in the Community Collection at the time of this writing, which is absolutely remarkable. And they reflect what the sprawing M○C△ community itself —which is far more wholly representative of crypto art than we internally— believes to be important and believes should be preserved.
Maybe it’s because there are so many pieces in that collection compared to the Genesis and Permanent Collections.
Maybe it’s because we have no internal say in what gets activated into this collection.
Maybe it’s because M○C△ doesn’t actually own these pieces.
Whatever the reason is, it’s been a struggle to communicate to the public that this collection is as much a legitimate and celebratory part of the Museum as any other collection we offer. And it’s remarkable what we can learn about crypto art from looking at this collection. For example, just anecdotally, I can tell you that there are way less PFP projects in the Community Collection today than there were in 2021 when it launched, and there are way more AI-created artworks. Doesn’t that feel more vital to understanding crypto art’s evolution than a collection which merely preserves a host of this movement’s original innovators? Obviously preservation is vital, but we can only know what to preserve when we have historical perspective, and it’s impossible to have historical perspective on the present. With the Community Collection, we allow the wider crypto art world to tell its story in the non-linear, reactionary, many-sourced way that it must. No collection in any museum can do so if they are internally deciding on what is important and what isn’t. This is one of the reasons crypto art is so revolutionary: It not only picks apart the failures of the past, but it provides a solution to those failures.
The Community Collection could never exist in a physical art movement (good luck finding a place to safely store nearly 10,000 artworks). It could never exist without smart contract integration. It could never exist if it was sequestered in a single geographic location.
So to answer your question literally: We do not have a given criteria for integrating new artists into M○C△. But you might. And that criteria is as worthy as anyone’s. We hope you —and everyone else with their own unique criteria— will use the tools we’ve provided to demonstrate that criteria, publicize it, and use it to bring the new artists they admire to as many people as possible, preserving these artists forevermore.
- Your Friendly Neighborhood Digital Art Museum,
M○C△