Despite the NFT Crash, a New Book Argues That the Technology Still Has the Power to Build a Better Digital Art Future, Amy Whitaker & Nora Burnett Abrams, δημοσίευση στο Artnet news [16/3/2023]

DADA Collective, Creeps & Weirdos, detail and selection from the collection curated by Judy Mam and Beatriz Ramos. Minted as ERC-20 tokens in 2017, reminted as ERC-721 tokens in 2019. Photo courtesy of the artists.

“I think one of the biggest ideas that I would put out there is really trying to use and harness this technology to redistribute power—these interlocking systems, whether it’s museums, collectors, free ports, auction houses, etc. I also think that one of the really beautiful things is the way in which this technology builds community. That’s something that is beautiful. It can be everlasting.”
— Cheryl Finley, professor, curator, and writer

Beatriz Ramos was working as a commercial illustrator building billion-dollar corporate brands when she and Judy Mam, a writer, began discussing a particular inequity in the art world: Artists built value creatively that they did not own. Artists could put their portfolios online and “people would give you a like,” as Mam said, but at some point, as Ramos said: “If we want artists to form a community, we need to give them the tools to do what they do best, which is make art.” Ramos and Mam imagined a global collective of artists making work together. The impetus for founding their platform, DADA, was to nurture creativity and to gather people together. To join the community, you had to respond to someone else’s drawing with a drawing of your own—to participate in a visual conversation with others.

DADA was founded in 2014, well before broader consciousness of NFTs. Mam and Ramos conceived of this digital community as a space where artists could draw, create, and connect with one another. To their surprise, they found that people liked the creative freedom of drawing with strangers from all over the world—not fearing being judged by close friends but experimenting.

The first DADA collection of NFTs, Creeps & Weirdos, evolved from multiple artists in multiple conversations and was curated by Ramos and Mam. When asked about the title, they said it was because, considering the imaginative forms that these visual conversations had spawned, “some were creepy and some were weird.” The name arose from Ramos and Mam’s desire to create a “coherent collection to be tokenized.” They were aware of the “creepy weird aesthetic” of Rare Pepes, leading them to choose “that creepy, weird aesthetic on purpose.” They launched the project on Halloween 2017, which included secondary sales royalties for artists embedded into the smart contract, and have since reinvested monies raised from sales of their NFTs back into their community.

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Despite the NFT Crash, a New Book Argues That the Technology Still Has the Power to Build a Better Digital Art Future, Amy Whitaker & Nora Burnett Abrams, δημοσίευση στο Artnet news [16/3/2023]