-the M○C△ team
A Museum can both preserve or challenge the status quo, positioning themselves as a force for gatekeeping or for truth-seeking, all their decisions collectively demonstrating the core values they hold.
A Museum’s art collection, its educational content, written essays, membership strategy, and curated exhibitions are all political and ideological decisions with widespread cultural ramifications. Non-profit, public arts institutions carry a great responsibility, and they cannot develop their artistic approach frivolously.
Decentralization offers a new avenue for humanity in group decision-making and social collaboration. To date, few arts institution have begun the process of decentralization and none have successfully achieved it. It is crucial for the institution to have both a technology stack and an internal hierarchy that pragmatically allows the organization to distribute power equitably among its community. As a blockchain-native institution, the Museum of Crypto Art will always innovate and explore the capabilities of web3 technology. We will minimize the gatekeeping that monolithic approaches to Museum-ship have historically upheld.
Throughout M○C△’s existence, we have steadily leveraged Ethereum NFTs and the Polygon blockchain to maximize our community’s input in our decisions.
That has taken the form of:
Crypto Art’s proliferation has largely resulted from its immediacy, its ability to capture shifting global cultural norms and to realign itself according to new information, new precedents, and new voices. By offering M○C△’s community of artists, collectors, curators, technologists an opportunity to directly influence (via decentralized voting system) the Museum’s curation, we will strengthen our alignment with cryptocurrency’s underpinning values: decentralization, reactivity, and democracy.
Using our Snapshot tool, we will propose three different programming themes to the community each month. Themes will cross art, politics, and philosophy. For example: Trash Art, or Seeing in Code: Minimal Abstraction. After choosing a theme, the community can help curate/select Exhibitions (virtual or IRL), Artist interviews, Collaborations, Podcasts or Twitter Spaces, and Essays.
Initially, these programs will be proposed by Museum principals, but in long-term will be fully selected by the community.
Two programming proposals will be offered by the Museum itself, with the third proposal being both submitted and selected by the community. M○C△’s artist council will have final approval over suitable selections (this is mostly to filter out trolling, which we all know can be powerful).
With the presumptive success of this extended trial program, we hope to expand community-driven proposals to the fullest possible extent.
M○C△ Points will be the primary weight factor when voting, allowing users a stronger influence on the path the museum’s curation will take.
M○C△ Points are a weighted aggregation of how much $MOCA one holds and one’s level of interaction with our ecosystem of tools: $FLOOR, $ROOM, $MOCA token, staked liquidity, community POAPs, likes and comments in our Dapp, etc. ****This customized configuration allows M○C△ to offer voting power that is aggregated from On-chain engagement plus other more diversified interactions. The more one uses our platform, the more Points one earns, expanding the influence one can have in the Museum’s future programming.
Owning M○C△ ROOMs NFTs grants a large amount of Points. Holding $MOCA on Polygon or Ethereum increases M○C△ Points as well. A point multiplier can be earned by Staking $MOCA Tokens (note: LP tokens and Quickswap pools offer the best Token-to-Points ratio).
One can also increase M○C△ Points by actively engaging in the community (Discord, Twitter, etc.). Acquiring various M○C△ POAPs (often through Museum missions on our Discord) grants Points, as does social activity in the form of On-chain comments and likes upon pieces in either of the Museum’s collections.
Ownership of $MOCA Token remains the primary influence over decision-making processes within the Museum. $MOCA ownership translates to proportionally greater participation in the Museum’s programming proposals. In the long-term, $MOCA will lead our transition from single-owner curatorship to a quasi-DAO to a full DAO.
We envision M○C△ becoming a truly-decentralized vehicle for cultural output and reflection. In the future, we dream of a community which, through social interactions, shapes the Museum’s complete program, with the M○C△ team acting more as facilitators of that cultural output rather than its architects. We hope (and believe) that this system will inspire a multiplicity of voices and points-of-view; provide a natural, scaleable platform for diverse and cutting-edge ideas; and create a rich, inclusive cultural output.
We invite you to be a part of this most experimental path with us. We need you, and everyone who is interested in art and culture, to join us. This will be — must be — a collective effort, and cannot become a reality without a strong, committed, and active community.
-the M○C△ team Towards Decentralizing M○C△ A Museum can both preserve or challenge the status quo, positioning themselves as a force for gatekeeping or for truth-seeking, all their decisions collectively demonstrating the core values they hold. A Museum’s art collection, its educational content, written essays, membership strategy, and curated exhibitions are all political and ideological decisions with […]
CohentheWriter Chats with the Algorist, Apeirographer, and AI Artist In part two of my conversation with Daïm Aggot-Hönsch (otherwise known as DaïmAlYad), we hone in on his individual artworks, his continuing interest in Slow Art, and a forthcoming project of his which Aggot-Hönsch affectionately and earnestly sees as his Magnum Opus. The following is the condensed […]
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or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bored Apes A prototypical Bored Ape. This one resides in M○C△’s Community Collection, courtesy of 0x87885aaeeded51c7e3858a782644f5d89759f245 Prologue: An Admission of Guilt This is not the piece I wanted to write. This is not the piece I wanted you to see. I wanted to write about how the […]
Gargantuan artworks and neon shapes flicker far away like distant bug-zappers, attracting meta-wanderers who teleport in atop moonlit fields The Museum of Crypto Art in Somnium Space Imagine standing at the inception of a new architectural era. Imagine spatial experiences built without the constraints of materiality, gravity, or weather. Architecture freed from itself, from all its former […]