The Future Of Art Is Decentralized
Musee Dezentral is building the world’s first decentralized NFT Museum.
Blockchain technology is like a jet tearing through the sky. Its supersonic waves are reaching into every corner of our lives.
From finance to privacy, from IoT to voting, there are seemingly limitless use cases for decentralized technologies. Most of which have not even been thought of yet.
So of course it only makes sense that creative people would start to use blockchain technology to reshape and transform the ways in which we think about ownership and art.
Blockchain is empowering a new generation of creative people
There are many ways in which blockchain is empowering artists in many different fields, including visual artists, video artists, creative coders, musicians, video artists, and more.
One of the most predominant ways blockchain technology empowers artists is with the Non-Fungible Token (NFT), a digital proof of ownership that exists on the blockchain as a smart contract.
An easy way to understand this is to think of the opposite of Non-fungible, which is ‘Fungible.” Our money is fungible. Every 20 dollar bill you get is worth 20 dollars. In contrast, every NFT is not the same and represents something unique.
How are NFTs reshaping the lives of artists?
Before NFTs, the value of digital art was something that was hard to determine. The ease with which a digital file, like a jpeg or mp3, can be replicated made it hard to assert its value.
The introduction of NFTs changes that dynamic. Every NFT that represents a digital artwork is unique, it can not be copied or forged and its ownership can be clearly asserted, maintained, and transferred. This has opened up a new and thriving market for digital art.
NFTs & Web3 are allowing artists to bypass gatekeepers
Traditionally artists would seek representation by a gallery, or similar art institution. These galleries and institutions would display their work, when they wanted to, and they would manage the sale of their work, often taking large commissions of 50% or more.
Today, artists can use NFTs to curate their own collections online. Therefore eliminating, or subverting, some institutions that traditionally acted as gatekeepers to the art world. Allowing artists to have unprecedented control over their careers.
Of course, there will always be a role in the world for traditional art institutions, galleries, and museums, but as with any new technology that reshaped the world, we have entered into a time of transition.
Introducing the metaverse
As if that was not enough, we also have entered the age of the ‘metaverse,’ a kind of catch-all term describing immersive online experiences, like 3D environments, virtual reality, and augmented reality.
The global push towards the metaverse is so strong that monolithic tech giant Facebook rebranded to Meta, to mark their decision to invest in building metaverse products. Microsoft and other tech giants have followed suit in announcing their plans for building the metaverse.
Although these moves are exciting to people who dream of life inside the metaverse, we feel now more than ever it is important to create places inside the metaverse that is autonomous, decentralized, and free from corporate control.
Metaverse environments where creative people can feel they are free to express themselves. In these environments, the lines between artist and programmer will be blurred, as more independent creative people build online immersive experiences.
What are we doing to help this transition?
First, we built Rave Space, a club experience inside our own metaverse, where the user is projected into a club, based on a typical club in Berlin.
Rave Space allows users from all over the world to do everything they could do in a normal club, except they are doing it inside a browser-based virtual environment. Adjacent to the club we built an NFT art gallery, that is open to the public 24/7.
After this, we built the 3D museum and website for Greats.art, featuring the work of Wolfgang Beltracchi. This project was brought to you by the team behind The Hashmasks. For this project, we built a completely custom backend to create a very smooth and immersive experience.
Now, we are building the Musee Dezentral, a decentralized 3D NFT museum built inside the metaverse. A completely borderless art experience that is available to all.
Unlike a traditional museum experience where the work is curated by the museum, we designed the museum so the art inside is curated decentrally by token holders. More details on how this work will be released on Dec 1st, with our white paper.
The Future of Musee Dezentral
The NFT museum inside Musee Dezentral is only the beginning. We plan to continuously add new museums inside Musee Dezentral, that will be dedicated to other forms of art such as fine art, street art, and sound installations.
One of our primary goals is to create a borderless 3D museum experience. Not everyone has access to museums and galleries, we hope in our own small way we can fix this. In the metaverse, we are not bound to the physical limitations of space.
For some there may be a financial barrier, of course, we know not everyone can afford a new laptop and oculus. So we will do our best to make the experience available to even people with limited smartphone technology.
