ArtsDAO

In 2021 I joined the founding board of ArtsDAO, a Web3 art and culture community. It was the year I founded Unlimitart to collect digital art and co-founded Nception. 2021 was the year digital art found a market and had not yet found its institutions.

The two commitments sat on different sides of the same market. Unlimitart put capital behind my judgment about which digital art mattered. A founding seat at ArtsDAO put me among the people shaping how an art community would organise itself before it had habits.

A DAO gives a community a shared structure and a way to decide together. For art, that moves the role of patron and curator from a single institution to a group of people who act in public.

The tension in any art DAO is between collective decision and curatorial judgment. A vote can allocate resources. It cannot tell a community which artists matter. A founding board carries that tension first, while the community is still forming and before any vote has set a precedent. Founding boards set the culture that later members inherit.

The seat mattered again in a different room. When Keith Grossman, then President of TIME, consulted me on TIMEPieces, part of the work was partnerships and introductions. ArtsDAO was among them, alongside Mondoir and actors and communities connected to BAYC.

Introductions I made for TIMEPieces led to collaborations, and artists I recommended worked with TIME. ArtsDAO was one of the communities I brought into that conversation.

An introduction carries the reputation of the person who makes it. I could put ArtsDAO in front of TIME because I had helped found it and knew what it was.

I took a founding seat on the ArtsDAO board in 2021, in a community I knew from the inside, and later put that community in front of one of the most visible media projects in the market.