Building on some of the ideas of WART (Wrapped Art) tokens gives us a powerful toolbox for organizing the evaluation and production of blockchain art.
Rather than using a Moloch DAO to decide which ERC-721 contracts to accept tokens from as we could in WART, we can use it to curate a collection of tokenised art directly by voting decide which tokens to purchase, commission, lend and sell as a form of Decentralized Aesthetics (DeAes, pronounced “dais”).
The membership application tribute for joining the DAO can be ERC-721 tokens (unwrapped if we modify the Moloch DAO codebase to directly handle ERC-721 as well as ERC-20 tokens, or else wrapped in the DAO’s own purely internal equivalent of WART) or Wrapped Ether (for the purchase fund). WART itself should not be used for this as it (deliberately) makes selecting artworks for their aesthetic content more difficult.
Each proposal for managing the collection that the membership puts forward to be voted on must fit the stated aesthetic of the DAO, and each member’s votes must evaluate whether that fit is real and appropriate. The DAO’s aesthetic and the interpretation/application strategy used to realize it can be updated through voting proposals, with or without rewards for successfully making the change.
If a DAO member wishes to ragequit they can take art and Ether proportional to their shares. Art allocation strategies for ragequitting can use an internal equivalent to WART, a simple FIFO queue or ERC-721 token, a flat percentage scheme using an agreed-upon source of (pseudo)-randomness, or a more complex combination of or replacement for any of these approaches.
Operationalizing and financializing aesthetic evaluation in this way via investment portfolio management ties art historical development to market signaling in a dynamic and accelerated way, which is to say a mutually beneficial one. This is a radical approach that asks both art historians and financial investors to learn much from each other. Despite this it still cannot reach into the artwork except before the fact in the form of commissions, which extends the history of patronage in a useful way but leaves the frame of the artwork otherwise intact.
We can take this approach further by making the DAO’s voting proposals purely for commissioning or authenticating art, turning the DAO into an artist itself. The former recreates a Koonsian approach to the outsourced fabrication of art, the latter a Kostabian one. The producers of these artworks can be paid in Loot or if the aim of the DAO is to grow by adding like-minded members they can be paid in fully voting shares.
Even where the DAO becomes active in the production of art in this way the edges of the artwork are left intact after its production, securing the interior of the artwork against being connected to market signals. Removing the firewall of the frame rather than routing around it or simply liquidating its contents (an approach I discussed along with the WART proposal) will take still more radical steps.