Crypto Artists Share How Web3 Tools Enable Diverse Art Market Experiments

Emerging Web3 technologies are emboldening old school artists to experiment with creative media in unique ways and distribute digital art through global, decentralized networks.

The creative economy represented 4.4 percent of GDP, according to data published in 2021 by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, just over $1 trillion. And now the creative economy is also a fundamental cornerstone of the crypto economy. Countless EthereumETH-friendly art collectives, in particular, are still growing their communities despite the bear market.

Related articles

DraftKings Exits NFT Business Due to Legal Issues

30 July 2024

BlockDAG’s Leadership Unveil – Crypto Market Titans Behind Game Changing Presale Challenge VeChain and Optimism’s Growth

30 July 2024

ADVERTISEMENT

The CryptoArt Footprint Of Female Founders

One such community is DADA, an ecosystem of over 175,000 participants that was created by two female founders, Beatriz Ramos and Judy Mam. Far from being a crypto fad, DADA is an old school art community that will commemorate its ten year anniversary next year. The jubilee kicks off this May in Milan with a special exhibit – The “DADA Perspective” – curated by Web3 artist Eleonora Brizi at the iconic MEET Digital Culture Center in Italy.

The exhibit will draw from the collective’s rich history of work and add new dimensions. For example, DADA collaborated with roboticist Alex Reben to program an Artificial Intelligence bot back in 2019, using DADA’s 115,000 portfolio of works. DADAGAN, is being rebooted as an autonomous artist-in-residence just in time for the Italian exhibit, and will have its own unique social media presence.

Artists Ramos and Mam first launched the DADA digital platform in 2014, then infused blockchain technology into their work starting in 2017. The New York based entity was one of the first art projects to code royalties into Ethereum smart contracts, enabling creators to profit from secondary market sales. Long before the NFT craze attracted mainstream attention with CryptoKitties, DADA’s “Creeps & Weirdos” collection was issued on Ethereum for Halloween 2017.

DADA is fashioned in the style of the Dadaism artistic movement of the early 20th century, which sought to disrupt the bourgeois, capitalist art society that profited an elite few. In an interview with me, Mam describes the platform as an “giant open canvas” where artists speak through drawings. Adding Web3 technology to the mix can only enhance the open collaborations between artists exploring this genre.

The Invisible Economy

As early crypto adopters, the DADA founders were determined not to create a space that “replicated the dynamics of the traditional art market,” says Mam. She added that today’s centralized art business is a rat race that picks winners and losers based on trends, competition and access. Instead, the DADA Collective aims to use Web3 tools to venture “beyond the prospect of simply transacting in digital assets.” The art itself should subvert or question power dynamics in the creative economy.

These founders are seasoned Latina artists who have worked with Fortune 500 companies, Ramos as a commercial illustrator and Mam as a published writer. Yet they wanted DADA to be anything but commercial. Instead, Mam says they are exploring an “invisible economy” that uses non-business models for promoting art in ways that minimize inequity while fostering audience participation. That’s where Web3 tools come in.

The DADA collective aims to launch a token later this year that may help quantify “intangible value, that is beyond simple economic value,” Ramos said during a Blockchain Small Business Week Forum in May 2021. Rather than focusing mainly on the token price, Mam told me the token will enable community governance for an unconventional digital art marketplace. However, the DADA Collective is not a decentralized autonomous organization. They’ll experiment with voting structures that allow for optimal participation.

Fusing New Technologies

This experiment is already influencing the art world. The newly published book, “The Story of NFTs: Artists, Technology, and Democracy,” by Amy Whitaker and Nora Burnett Abrams, pays homage to DADA’s impact and documents their early journey to harness Blockchain technology to empower and build community. Still, Mam and Ramos are certainly not alone in their innovative approach to fusing artistic experiences with new technologies.

There’s also Spatial Labs, where CEO Iddris Sandu is designing infrastructure to power Web3, melding physical products with digital utility. Their state of the art technology enables creatives to tap digital assets to curate immersive user interfaces to maximize revenue generation.

And Lady PheOnix, a new media and culture artist, blazed new trails in 2021 when she unveiled “PROOF OF SOVEREIGNTY” for Christie’s Auction House. In addition to smart contracts, she blended metadata, storage, and legal standards to architect the crypto art and NFT extravaganza. In describing the Christie’s event in a press release, Lady PheOnix said, “PROOF OF SOVEREIGNTY places the sovereignty and legacy of the artist at the center of the conversation—and has established a new standard for artists, collectors, and institutions…These practices rarely get implemented outside of museums and academia, but are essential for the long-term preservation and storage of digital art.”

As traditional creative industries continue to be disrupted, the upcoming DADA exhibit in Italy, which opens on May 10, is a timely retrospective celebrating the crypto art culture the two female founders have built over almost a decade. Artists like Beatriz Ramos and Judy Mam, as well as female founders like Lady PheOnix and other crypto-savvy art collectives, are showing how digital models can transform the creative economy.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.