M○C△ Community Collection
Museum Members can play a crucial role in democratizing not just the creation of art but the consumption of it.
The museum experience has traditionally been distant: a governing body or institution curates a collection of artworks based on its own, sometimes archaic, internal metrics (for instance, the prestigious French Salon once considered the Impressionists — Monet, Manet, Degas, etc. — puerile and unskilled), displays its works in some imposing space, and then, and only then, does the public get to interact with the pieces. Safely. From behind that wire there. Or else you risk provoking the security guard who looms at the edge of every room.
This model is sterile by design. The capital-I Institution has all the power, and you, the lowly observer, are allowed to pick at the crumbs which they provide for you. This doesn’t allow for collaboration. It keeps capital-A Art locked away in an ivory tower, where it continues to solidify its reputation as elitist. But Crypto Art is already democratizing the artistic process, not just who creates art, but who owns it and who gets to see it and where. Therefore, M○C△ is interested in not merely being a place where all people can interact with great, thoughtful, boundary-pushing art, but in being a place where all people can actively curate a museum collection itself. Ours is Enthusiast-Oriented Curation. M○C△ offers a new level of interaction with a museum and its exhibits both in display and in curation. Membership in M○C△ is about shaping the direction of the museum itself, and having your art, the pieces which you own, displayed in IRL exhibits.
In opening up the curation experience to everyone, M○C△ has removed the universal exclusivity which has historically provided value for museums. Having a hand in M○C△ curation is what we offer instead, and that curation is possible by navigating through to the M○C△ App and connecting your wallet. You’ll have the opportunity there to “activate” NFTs from whichever wallet you’ve connected, a process which automatically adds them to the Museum’s Community Gallery, where they become seamless segments of the broader collection. For more specific instructions, consult this essential guide on getting your Member Pass set up. It’s free to do all this, but your functionality within this ecosystem will increase substantially if you hold $MOCA, the museum’s proprietary, Polygon-based governance token. Hold it, stake it, lock it away, as long as you own some, you’re in.
Besides letting you curate pieces and display them for others to admire, the Community Gallery functions secondarily as a Social Media network, where anyone and everyone can come to find art which moves them, then connect with likeminded collectors. This makes it easy for many collectors to connect with each other, to compare their sensibilities, to form communities around the art they enjoy, collect, and identify with. Through this connective network, organic communities of collections become the prime nodes in our community curation process. Today the Community Collection has surpassed 1000 artworks.
This community curation is radical for museums, but more importantly it’s revolutionary for the culture of art as an experience. On a purely practical level, it is no longer necessary for collectors to engage with the expensive logistical nightmare of packing art pieces, entrusting them to middlemen, and arranging their safe passage from a collector’s hands to a museum’s. Physical and financial limitations to collecting and transfer of art no longer apply. M○C△ is passionate about inclusion, and to that end, we’re trying to remove all the ways museums have traditionally isolated themselves from public input.
Also, it’s exciting to activate your pieces into the Community Gallery. Pieces from this Gallery are frequently included in larger IRL collections and exhibitions. On October 16 2021, an exhibit of 17 artworks from the Community Collection occurred in Bad Oeynhausen, Germany. People activated NFTs into their Member’s Pass and just because of that action, their NFTs were exhibited in the real world.
By activating pieces and placing them in the Community Collection, you are providing an opportunity for critics and curators and collectors to find, display, and inquire into the works you own. Curators and teams across the world are free to select and display the Community Collection to everyone in the venue, real-world location, and environment of their choice. We are in a veritable wave of artistic innovation, and by simply collecting pieces that speak to you, becoming a M○C△ member, and activating your NFTs (which does not, for the record, remove them from your wallet), you can play a crucial role in democratizing not just the creation of art but the consumption of it.
Crypto Art is a central democratizing force that digital art has been building towards. Pieces range from from cosmically expensive to essentially free. Much of this art grows organically based on its own intrinsic merits. Artists control their own fates, their own communities, their own collectorship. And as a member of this Museum we hope to give you a hand in it as much as anyone.
We are at such an early stage of Crypto Art’s development. Join M○C△, become a member, train your eye to the things that move you, and then activate them in the Community Collection, where they can move the rest of us, and the rest of the world, too. No admittance fee required!
Thoughts? Ideas? Find us here: https://forum.museumofcryptoart.com/
