By Collin Frazier
Well-known leader in the conversation surrounding crypto art and NFTs, the Museum of Crypto Art (MoCA) recently launched its latest venture in the form of a Space on the SuperRare platform, marking it as the second of its kind, and furthering the realization of the SuperRare 2.0 mission of greater decentralization of the platform. MoCA, a completely virtual museum existing within Somnium Space, operates as an institution that is dedicated to the documentation and preservation of the history of crypto art, avant garde technological progress, and the advancement of NFTs as mainstays within our quickly growing collective culture. The MoCA Space will function as an extension of their already substantial collection of works and artists. Its curators; Colborn Bell, Shivani Mitra, and Micol Ap; view the Space as a platform for elevating the voices of artists who are currently represented in their collections, the ultimate goal being to showcase artwork that captures the intrepid spirit of crypto art, crypto culture, and its history. With this new Space, the curators aspire to challenge and propel imagination by showcasing lesser-recognized artists who helped carve out the ever-expanding space in which crypto art, as both a concept and a movement, currently exists.
MoCA, which launched in April 2020, began as a conceptual project seeking to bring artists together across the metaverse and allow visitors to experience art in a virtual world. The Museum, which evolved in both concept and leadership structure over the course of 2020, would eventually grow to become a non-profit organization that could, by way of the ERC-721 Standard, provide artists with a place to display their work and earn money. While furnishing creators from all over the world with a place to bring their art together to be publicly viewed, Colborn Bell, Founder and Director of MoCA, says that the Museum also strives to be a modern institution that embraces the core values of crypto art as cultural advancement: “so, all of the philosophies that are baked into cryptocurrency, be it self-sovereignty, be it data privacy, be it every individual’s right to an open-access network for creative expression…[MoCA] is meant to almost be the total inverse of what would be conceptually thought of as a museum.”
The core of MoCA’s body of works is referred to as their Genesis Collection, and represents significant historical NFT artworks, the majority of which were minted onto the blockchain before 2021, which is when the Museum considers the concept of NFTs to have exploded into meme culture, greatly diluting the integrity of the space as a domain for artistic discourse. The Genesis Collection consists of a valuable assemblage…
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