Dear MOCA: How Do You Decide What Artworks are Culturally Significant?
In so many words...
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Dear M○C△,
Is it possible for M○C△ to host collections of NFTs that have tied to them significant cultural value?
Sincerely,
Culturally Inquisitive
Dear Culturally Inquisitive,
I get the impression that your question was very literal, like can the Museum literally do something along these lines, i.e. do we have the technology, the willpower, the mental capacity, etc.
Short answer: Yes, there’s nothing stopping us from assembling a collection —or collections— featuring NFTs with what we believe have significant cultural value. In fact, we’ve done so multiple times (more on that later).
But your question also necessarily raises some very interesting questions about, well, what exactly is cultural value within crypto art? And is it the responsibility of a crypto art museum to make such a determination? If not, then what is the purpose of a crypto art museum? When it comes to actually making preservational decisions for the future, where does a museum beholden to crypto art’s ethos begin to delineate what “significant cultural value” even means?
Will naturally be trying to answer these questions today.
I think we have to start with this whole museum thing. Obviously, I can’t speak for all crypto art museums —because I’m sure Benoit Couty at the other Museum of Crypto Art (yes, there are two, if you weren’t aware, and Benoit does awesome work) or the team at the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art (MoCDA) would have their own answers— but from my perspective, the crypto art museum’s first priority is not to hold or display artworks.
Which immediately sets it apart from what a museum has traditionally always been: first and foremost a tool used to secure and then promote artworks, narratives, and significance.
But crypto artworks are protected on-chain (god-willing). They are in no risk of physical destruction unless a server goes down (through our own partnership with Filecoin, or Artnome’s ClubNFT help prevent such catastrophes), and even then, they’ll continue to exist ideologically. Crypto artworks can also be curated by anyone, anywhere, at any time, and in my estimation, most of the old-world museum role of communicating importance via collection has been filled by collectors themselves. In the wallets of individual collectors are their own retellings of crypto art’s history. Each is going to be different of course, which is vital because the “narrative” of crypto art is too wide-ranging and unruly for any one entity —be it Museum or even an enormous collection— to adequately capture its mass.
So why even try? It’s a futile endeavor to begin with.
The crypto art museum’s number one priority is to act as the glue which holds community together. Crypto art itself is indeed a grandiose community, and though that word gets thrown around by every PFP project with a Discord server, the truth is that in crypto art, so highly-online and so ever-seeking of like minds, communities form quickly and energetically. The larger the community, the more nodes in its system, the more accurate (read: multinodal) its collective understanding of crypto art will be. Keeping that community together, enlivened, conversational, and growing is the crypto art museum’s priority.
And yes that can be achieved, though limitedly, through collection.
Or it can be achieved through the creation and release of tools: curatorial, exhibitional, developmental, which then get used, remixed, redeployed elsewhere by the community.
It can be bolstered through critical analysis, as we do in this newsletter, on our podcasts, in our long-form essays.
As well as innumerable other ways.
What a museum cannot do any longer is posit itself as an authority. As I’ve said often, there’s too much crypto art, and it’s too truly chaotic to be accurately represented by some single POV, even if that POV is a many-minded team running a Museum like M○C△. Just the other day, Colborn and I released a deep-dive podcast on Artnome’s “What is CryptoArt,” a foundational text from 2018 which we believed was the first use of the term CryptoArt.
Thanks to KBOMetaverse, however, it became clear that the verbiage “crypto art” has actually been in use since 2014, when it was used to describe Bitcoin wallets with artistry attached to them. We can get things wrong too! And maybe KBOMetaverse is also wrong, maybe it was used somewhere even before that, and thus any narrative —even when well-researched— will always be subject to individual bias.
History changes depending on who is examining it. We established our Community Collection (with over 9200 pieces at the time of this writing) specifically to eliminate the inherent bias that came about when we began picking and choosing what pieces to include in our Permanent Collection. It was better, we believed (and we were right), to let the M○C△ community itself add and detract from our collections in real time, as they saw fit; in that way, we would perhaps be able to relay to each other and to all future interested parties that the various artistic and preservational sensibilities contained within the sprawling crypto art community are as important and worthy of preservation as our own.
Thus, challenging any single entity’s idea —even our own, especially our own— of “importance” is a veritable commandment for any crypto art museum. We will inevitably each have our own narratives, but we must also and everywhere stay communicating that there are others.
And there sure are others.
Which explains why I bristle at the very idea of something having “significant cultural value.” The very first paragraph of our M○C△ Manifesto —featured brilliantly on our homepage— reads as follows:
At its core, the Museum of Crypto Art (M○C△) challenges, creates conflict, provokes. M○C△ puts forward a broad representation of perspectives meant to upend our sense of who we are. It poses two questions: “what is art?” and “who decides?”
We do not believe any one entity gets to decide on the significance of any given artwork. We want to provide every individual the tools and knowhow to make those decisions for themselves. If M○C△ —or any person/organization— begins asserting itself as a de facto cultural value decision-maker, it has lost the plot. It is already setting itself up for failure by acting as an arbiter of that which cannot be arbitrated. We aim to seek, not to find.
Now you would be right to remind me that M○C△ does indeed have a Permanent Collection of things we indeed believe to have cultural value. That would include:
The Genesis Collection, featuring one work by one artist who was minting on the blockchain prior to December 2020 (simply filter for the Genesis Collection when visiting the Permanent Collection;
The Daïmalyad Collection, a repertoire of 70+ artworks from predominantly non-white, non-male, non-European/American artists generously donated by Mr. Daïmalyad earlier in early 2023 (can filter for this one too);
The greater Permanent Collection, composed of pieces donated to us by this or that party, and which we want to highlight in the crypto art narrative;
The forthcoming Contractual Obligations Collection, where we have partnered with Matt Kane to be the eternal stewards of his multi-part Contractual Obligations performance. This collection is both a true collection and a part of the performance itself, which you can read more about here if you like;
And the Fundraiser Collection, containing all the 700+ artworks submitted for inclusion in our 2023 M○C△ Fundraiser DNFT.
These collections reflect a number of different approaches to capturing cultural significance. We obviously have an interest in safeguarding the names and styles those who were making crypto art first, as well as the understanding that crypto art is a truly global art movement. We want to be as much an active participant in crypto art as we are an objective institution somewhat outside of it. And we want to preserve our own history too.
I’d suggest that each of these collections asserts its own internal understanding of “significant cultural value,” but we’re careful not to position these as anything more than what they are: themed collections of artworks. They are not the be-all end-all, and we do not want anyone to mistakenly think they are. In fact, our collections have glaring holes. We lack artworks by a lot of today’s big-name artists, for example. Many would rightly take issue with that. Ours is not a complete embodiment of crypto art, and it cannot be, and we don’t want to pretend it is, and we hope that through the Community Collection, the analyses we release, and the general tenor of the Museum’s voice you will become as aware as we are that M○C△ can only ever represent a scantling of the greater crypto art continuum.
So your question about whether we can “host collections of NFTs that have tied to them “significant cultural value,” is already therefore answered. We believe the answer is yes, but since we also don’t believe in any one way of ascertaining that cultural value, the answer is also inherently no. Classic contradiction.
But the important thing is that we will never —and can never— claim that we alone may determine a thing’s cultural value. We have our collections, we talk a lot about why we think they’re important, we provide the tools and platforms for others to disagree with us, and that great push-and-pull between:
“We hope we’re doing this right, but we are aware that we may not be.”
and
“You definitely aren’t doing this right.”
and
“Well please then, friend, lend your criticisms to the choir.”
is far more important to preserve than any one artwork, no matter its supposed significance.
This is the significant cultural value of crypto art: Its muchness, its lack of a singularity, its completely different appearance and hue depending on who is looking at it, from where, and when.
So, uhm, does that answer your question?
- Your Friendly Neighborhood Digital Art Museum,
M○C△