Beatriz Ramos was establishing billion-dollar corporate brands as a commercial illustrator when she and the writer Judy Mam began debating a unique injustice in the art world: artists created value that they did not possess. As Mam said, artists could post their portfolios online, and “people would give you a like.” Nevertheless, as Ramos stated, “if we want artists to develop a community, we must give them the tools to do what they do best, which is create art.” Ramos and Mam envisioned a global group of artists collaborating to create art. Their motivation for creating the DADA platform was to foster innovation and bring people together. To join the community, you were required to answer to someone else’s drawing with your own—to engage in a visual dialogue with others.
DADA was established in 2014, even before widespread awareness of NFTs. Mam and Ramos envisioned this internet community as a place where artists could collaborate, sketch, and create. Surprisingly, they discovered that people enjoyed the creative freedom of sketching with strangers from around the world, without worry of being criticized by intimate friends but rather exploring.
Ramos and Mam organized the first DADA collection of NFTs, Creeps & Weirdos, which was the result of various artists engaging in multiple talks. When questioned about the title, they stated that “some were frightening and some were bizarre” due to the inventive shapes that these visual talks had generated. The name was inspired by Ramos and Mam’s intention to develop a “coherent collection to be tokenized.” They were aware of Rare Pepes’ “scary odd aesthetic,” which led them to deliberately select “that eerie weird style.” Including secondary sales royalties for artists within the smart contract, they launched the initiative on Halloween 2017, and have since re-invested proceeds from the sale of their NFTs back into their community.
Eventually, DADA initiated a new type of dialogue: a series of “Invisible Economy” working groups. They envisioned a future in which art could be drastically divorced from the market and a shared economy could benefit the entire community via the value provided by its members. Ramos and Mam envisioned that although the works might be sold individually, a greater portion of the revenues would go into a fund that would be allocated to all the active members of the community, creating a type of universal basic income. Mam informed us, “Although at first individual artists received 70 percent of the primary sales and 30 percent of the secondary sales, today all proceeds from the sales of DADA’s tokenized collections go to a general fund where they will be distributed to all participating members of the community, including technologists, based on their contributions.” In other words, they organized a communal version of artists’ resale rights, the proportion of a secondary market sale that is returned to the artist, in both main and secondary markets.
DADA’s innovative addition of automatic royalties for artists also prompted a structural shift in how NFTs are transacted: A group of artists led by Sparrow Read and Matt Kane were essential in establishing royalty guidelines for NFT platforms such as SuperRare and OpenSea.
DADA’s questions go to the core of blockchain’s political potential: Can it provide new channels of support for artists individually, as well as forms of communal ownership, shared upside, and excess that can be reinvested in artistic futures? We find ourselves in a scenario where the world is swiftly changing and we are a part of it. So, the most important thing to do is not to answer questions, but to ask and interact with the appropriate ones.
How these new types of economic sustainability may be achieved through fractional equity and resale royalties is one of these crucial topics. The second concern is how cooperation and community practice are being developed in relation to these systems of royalties and asset accumulation, not just by artists but also by other underinvested communities. Here, questions are unsolvable on an individual level and can only be resolved collectively. This requirement for collaborative action may result in enormous power structure changes and enormous possibilities for community government models.
These concerns revolve on the themes of redistribution, participation, unfairness, and inclusion as they pertain to blockchain’s impact on democracy. Our series was inspired by the significance of pondering these questions, despite the absence of definitive solutions. These concerns are the focus of Whitaker’s study, as well as the research of several other scholars and practitioners that we were fortunate to welcome. Our objective here, in Abrams’s words—and image!—is to curate the huge 40-scoop sundae of future questions, ones we could never answer on our own, but that link these crossing stories of blockchain and give out clear options for how we may construct the future.