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Fine art on the blockchain
Exchange.art head curator Haley Karren came to Web3 from some of the world’s leading art institutions and says that working with 14,000 artists on Solana’s fine art marketplace has broadened her tastes.
“I have a new appreciation for pixel art, voxels and things that really are very much native to this space. It’s been fascinating to see the difference between what I was more interested in two years ago and what I’m interested in now.”
Formerly a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Karren says her role has always been as a “conduit” between contemporary artists and the rest of the world. Even more so now that she’s connecting traditional artists to a space that utilizes blockchain, NFTs and artificial intelligence.
“Digital art and traditional art spaces are moving together more and more. That’s a big push for us at Exchange.art, but there is still a little bit of a divide,” she says.
“There’s just a little bit of a bias against the blockchain in a sense, and I think it’s a little bit of not understanding it.”
She says often, collectors are unaware that the blockchain can be used for provenance, and artists don’t realize that NFTs can be programmed to collect royalties each time a piece is sold.
“It’s shifting some established norms in the art world that didn’t give artists enough ownership over their work,” she says.
“I try to help onboard people as well as artists or traditional art collectors. It is a process, you know, understanding what crypto is, understanding what a wallet is.”
In the traditional art world, galleries are the gatekeepers. For artists to sell works, galleries need to display them for buyers, taking commissions of up to 50% for doing so.
NFTs help replace these gatekeepers, giving control back to artists.
“It’s a huge shift in terms of sovereignty and shifting it back toward artists. It places much more responsibility on them to also market their work, to talk about their work and to present it coherently.”
Karren sees her current role as a “sounding board” for artists to think through how a series should be presented, and…
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