Crypto artists share how Web3 tools enable various art market experiments
New Web3 technologies encourage 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.
Data from the National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts
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-fashioned art society that will celebrate its tenth anniversary next year. The anniversary starts in May in Milan with a special exhibition – “DADA Perspective” – curated by Web3 artist Eleonora Brizi at the iconic MEET Digital Culture Center in Italy.
The exhibition will draw from the collective’s rich work history 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, will be rebooted as an autonomous artist-in-residence just in time for the Italian exhibition, 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 encode royalties into Ethereum smart contracts, which enabled creators to profit from secondary market sales. Long before the NFT craze gained mainstream attention with CryptoKitties, DADA’s “Creeps & Weirdos” collection was released 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 served an elite few. In an interview with me, Mam describes the platform as a “giant open canvas” where artists talk through drawings. Adding Web3 technology to the mix can only enhance the open collaboration between artists exploring this genre.
2017 Creeps & Weirdos Collection
Courtesy of The DADA Collective
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 possibility of simply trading digital assets.” Art itself should undermine or question power dynamics in the creative economy.
These founders are experienced Latina artists who have worked with Fortune 500 companies, Ramos as a commercial illustrator and Mam as a published author. Yet they wanted DADA to be anything but commercial. Instead, Mam says they are exploring an “invisible economy” that uses non-business models to promote art in ways that minimize inequality while promoting audience participation. This is where Web3 tools come in.
The DADA collective aims to launch a token later this year that could help quantify “intangible value, which is beyond simple economic value,” Ramos said during a Blockchain Small Business Week forum in May 2021. Instead of focusing mainly on the token price, Mam told me that the token will enable community governance for an unconventional digital art marketplace. However, the DADA collective is not a decentralized autonomous organization. They will experiment with voting structures that provide optimal participation.
Dada Collective Visual Conversation: “Untitled”
Courtesy of The DADA Collective
Merger of new technology
This experiment is already influencing the art world. The recently published book, “The Story of NFTs: Artists, Technology, and Democracy,” by Amy Whitaker and Nora Burnett Abrams, celebrates DADA’s impact and documents their early journey to harness Blockchain technology to empower and build community. Nevertheless, Mam and Ramos are certainly not alone in their innovative approach to combining artistic experiences with new technology.
There is also Spatial Labs, where CEO Iddris Sandu designs infrastructure to run Web3, and combines physical products with digital tools. Their state-of-the-art technology enables creatives to leverage digital assets to create immersive user interfaces to maximize monetization.
And Lady PheOnix, a new media and cultural artist, broke new ground in 2021 when she unveiled “PROOF OF SOVEREIGNTY” for Christie’s Auction House. In addition to smart contracts, she mixed metadata, storage and legal standards to build the crypto art and NFT extravaganza. 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 are rarely implemented outside of museums and academia, but is crucial for the long-term preservation and storage of digital art.”
As traditional creative industries continue to be disrupted, the upcoming DADA exhibition in Italy, opening on May 10, is a timely retrospective celebrating the crypto-art culture the two female founders have built over nearly a decade. Artists like Beatriz Ramos and Judy Mam, as well as female founders like Lady PheOnix and other crypto-savvy art collectives, show how digital models can transform the creative economy.
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