I bought Ethereum in February 2017, so I was quite early. It was in that capacity that I had the opportunity to find and explore crypto. I went from there to United Nations, where we were building an infrastructure bank in East Africa.įrom there, I went to a wealth management firm in Santa Monica started by vegan Buddhists, did that for about two and a half years, and then started running the U.S. I was born and raised in southern California, went to school in New York, studied economics and psychology, then did as much investment banking as I could take-about six months. What’s your background? How did you discover art and crypto art? Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Crypto Art. It’s very, very easy to have these works exhibited all over the world, and it’s obviously very cheap to do so.Ĭolborn Bell. So in the past two months we’ve had physical shows in Denver, New York, Boston, Berlin, Prague, and Shanghai. NFTs are incredibly hot at the moment, so people want to host and do things physically with our art, on our behalf. It’s very much like drinking from a fire hose right now, so I just try to do all of the most important things as they come in. So I’m doing a lot of curating, I’m going through the collection, I’m putting stuff together thematically. I’m also doing everything that would probably be involved with being a traditional museum curator and art dealer-basically being a therapist to artists. We designed something like eight exhibitions in the course of a couple of months. You’re on Twitter, you’re in Discords, you’re running through various marketplaces. I try not to take so many video calls anymore. What is a typical day for you right now running M○C△? Recently, I talked to Bell about his view of the NFT canon, the inspiration for M○C△, and where he thinks culture in general is going. Shows of digital art selected from the collection have popped up IRL around the world, and Bell says he has just sealed the deal on a space in a former church in Kingston, N.Y., which he is planning to make a physical extension of the Museum of Crypto Art.
M○C△’s ambitions extend beyond Somnium Space.
With the token currently trading at about $5.86, and a fixed supply of 10 million tokens, the museum has the equivalent of a $29 million war chest.Ĭolborn Bell in the Museum of Crypto Art’s new IRL space in Kingston, N.Y. Half of the supply of this bespoke currency is reserved for a fund for permanent-collection acquisitions, with donors getting a say in how the museum is run in exchange for their gifts. The museum is now incorporated as a nonprofit foundation, but with a crypto twist: it has its own “governance token,” $MOCA, which promises to allow owners to vote on the direction of the museum (the exact mechanisms are still in development). In the field’s short span, he is considered an OG, though his first purchase of a crypto artwork- Lady Luck by Miss al Simpson, a trippy image of a woman in a fedora-was only in February 2020.īell founded M○C△ shortly thereafter with Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile (the two have since parted ways). Colborn Bell is the face of the institution. As your avatar roams the virtual galleries, clicking on artworks calls up info, including a link to their listing on OpenSea, the NFT marketplace, and the price they were acquired for, in Ether (though M○C△’s works are not actually for sale).Īmid the tsunami of interest around NFTs and the metaverse, the Museum of Crypto Art-and its so-called Genesis Collection, 200 pieces by 200 artists who laid the foundations for the scene’s meteoric rise-has become a touchstone. Some of the art is also shown on the ceiling. Works are hung like paintings on its virtual walls, but without the constraints of real weather, they are displayed on both the outside and the inside of the museum.
The dream architecture of M○C△’s building seems to float, and its galleries are bisected by an odd, impossibly torqued spiral stair. None of this happens in real space, though: To find it, you have to venture into the cartoon landscape of Somnium Space, an online world. Enter the Museum of Crypto Art (M○C△) right now and you will find a show of about 50 artworks by many of the big names of the NFT space, drawn from its permanent collection: Frenetik Void’s Superyó, a surrealist image of a giant head Dmitri Cherniak’s Wreck a Man, his pastel abstraction evoking the art of in-demand mystical painter Loie Hollowell Trevor Jones’s Cubist Satoshi, an animation in which the facets of a Cubist painting reassemble themselves into the face of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto and, of course-the pièce de résistance-CryptoPunk #6926, a blocky, 16-bit image of a smoking punk in a hoodie.
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