With the effect of digital, the physical world has been technologically reduced to mobile devices and vehicles. So much so that we even started to do our daily work with our mobile devices. Some think that in the future we will live depending on VR glasses, while others think that technology and civilization will collapse. In fact, between these two radical extremes, there is an important link in the chain for our future... “Phygital”

From the point of view of the phygital area, technology possibilities, which are in a continuous process of change, have inevitably brought along innovations such as computer use and communication tools and forms. Technological applications, which have been showing themselves in areas such as communication, entertainment, and information processing for many years, have started to show themselves and make their weight felt in cultural areas such as exhibitions and experiencing the work of art. Digital exhibition methods, which are mostly used for purposes such as communication, giving information and gaining experience, have gained a wide field of applications and experience with the spread of NFTs. Exhibition techniques consisting of experience-oriented applications, three-dimensional projections and interactive technologies have provided new opportunities to reach the work of art and have given the opportunity to rediscover many applications experientially. If we look at the last 20 years, the artistic experience was built on sound and visual experience in the first years of the millennium, and although it has reached an advanced level with today's technologies, it has appealed to the game industry rather than the art market. Because it has been learned and experienced that exhibition is not only "emphasizing the object or image", it is necessary to have a curatorial infrastructure.

In this context, the curatorial perspective is part of the chain between the work and the audience. The fact is that only transferring the work of art to digital media and not creating an experience creates a fake effect that cuts it from its soul. In order to overcome this, it is necessary to construct the connection between the work and the digital environment in a physical sense and to create a psychological effect on the audience. The way to enhance the experience here is much more than simply setting up television screens between the artist, the curator, and the audience. In summary, all these experiences should include the perspective of design and different disciplines.

This power, which we initially discovered in the field of communication and marketing, has now started to grow in an area that includes blockchain technology in the field of art. In fact, it is not a new story that the work of art is exhibited with a new approach through the use of technological infrastructure and tools, by being fictionalized with the psychological impact, environment, and space created.

For example; An example of this is TeamLab, an international art collective, an interdisciplinary group of artists founded in Tokyo, Japan in 2001. It consists of artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects who call themselves “ultra technologists”. Just like in blockchain, a common consensus should be created and different disciplines should be acted upon in order to bring together the tools and stakeholders that transform art into experience today.

While the boundaries between digital and physical realities are gradually disappearing, our world of thought and concepts have begun to expand as "Phygital" beyond our daily work. It was all about connecting our knowledge with our inventions. Our primitive urge to learn and experience has opened the doors of "Phygital" to us today. This concept has also changed the art and the forms of exhibition. So much so that while the concept of museology that existed in the 19th century was concerned with "preserving the rare", today's museology is about experiencing the story or the work. was built upon. In the past century, museology was stuck between glass showcases, but now it focuses on creating an interactive experience with the ability to distinguish between different gestures such as touch, motion detection, click, drag, and magnification.

In summary; Turning art into an experience and gamifying it by using these technological infrastructures already reveals the art theories and movements that shape art history in the future. As technological progress continues, our desire to experience digital will increase and art will continue to be Phygitalized without leaving its context.

Art Historian, Curator, Founder Gallery Muaf

Ogulcan Yildirim

Now, let's take a closer look at the subject from an artistic perspective. Arts economy; in a contemporary sense, it is an expression used for the entire chain that covers what is produced in the artist's workshop, including exhibitions, galleries, auctions, and primary and secondary collectors. However, we have known since the Renaissance that the art economy goes back much further and is a part of strong capitals. For example; works made to the church by order, family collections.

Of course, when we look at it from this point of view, the monopolization and inequality of capital over the centuries have led to the construction of an unsustainable structure for art and artists since the beginning of the millennium. Non-organic increases in artwork prices, artworks constantly changing hands during economic crises and wealth transfers have always led to infertility in the art market. Although this sterility seemed to have eliminated the problems through Web2 initiatives at the beginning of the millennium, in fact, it could not go further than bringing the current system to the internet. Until web3 and blockchain appeared. The art economy has undergone an unstoppable change in recent years, although it did not have a full impact on Web3 in the first decade. Now, thanks to Web3, we can create our own economies by programming our values and ideas into our money. Here is the key point. Programmable money! The new creative economy, whose future we decide and shape together with our own talents and the community.

The pandemic has caused radical changes in the world as well. Changes have had an impact in many areas, and areas such as finance, culture, and art have gained rapid momentum in digitalization. These changes have brought NFTs into the blockchain, which has a common cluster in the fields of art, finance, and technology. With the spread of NFTs, the acceleration of cultural interaction between creative talents, and the development of rapid decision-making and progress processes, it was possible to implement these decisions collectively in terms of governance. The process inevitably brought the future of art and its technological infrastructure together with the blockchain, and the problems in the art ecosystem gradually disappeared and progress was made. Blockchain offered a solution to this, as central systems could no longer make progress in any sense. Transparent, fair, pluralistic, and sustainable. Being able to make elections on a network where the internet of values and money is created means building an Athenian Democracy for billions of people. Designing the future of art in this direction and establishing coordination between NFT, F-NFT and DAOs are some of the important steps in the creative economy. For example, the coordination that Particle carries out in the field of art today is making art more accessible and programming money for art. It is possible to see that not only Particle but also world-famous auction houses, galleries, and artists are included in this system day by day. We are at the beginning of humanity's social evolution, and culture is becoming more complex every day. Therefore, the best way to promote social well-being and culture is to make these economies sustainable. The solution for the preservation and improvement of culture and cultural heritage is also possible on the blockchain. Making information open-source, transferring traditional inventory recording methods to the blockchain with an environmentalist approach, raising funds, and using this fund for cultural heritage… The only technology that will provide us with this is blockchain.

We can ensure that museums, archaeological sites, and cultural heritage are recorded on the blockchain by making inventory records through NFTs. Keeping records of museums, archaeological finds, and cultural heritage on blockchain will not only prevent theft and loss of cultural heritage but will also ensure the development and diversity of the NFT ecosystem with different usage areas. Also, another aim of this idea would be to integrate traditional archiving, document saving, and classification into Web3.

In this way, historical artifacts will be tracked on the blockchain, historical artifacts and art crimes will be prevented, as well as the energy consumption of traditional methods will be minimized. On the other hand, I believe that not only the creative crypto economy but also the regenerative (healing) crypto economy will build sustainable forms and structures for cultural and cultural heritage. For culture and cultural heritage; however, we have only just begun to attempt to meet this challenge by focusing as much as possible on cultural systems that are complementary, remedial, or global in scope. We are embarking on a long journey. But it is not impossible. Sooner or later, we can do it.

Art Historian Ogulcan Yildirim

In the last century, the science of art history and museology has developed rather shallow approaches to property ownership and museology and has closed itself to innovations. In the classical sense, museology exhibits an understanding that is disconnected from society, allowing only the collection, preservation and exhibition of works. After this understanding, which lasted until the 1950s, contemporary museology, which aims to bring the works together with the audience rather than exhibiting them, has developed new exhibition and expression methods and laid its foundations at the beginning of the second half of the 20th century. it has also experienced different and important breaks up to the present day.

With the globalization phenomenon that emerged in the 90s, museology has become more involved with technology and has followed the development of technology in every field from work classification processes to bibliography. Technological developments started with resource scanning after the 90's, and then experienced its own change with the web evolution. With technologies such as AR and VR, museology was included in the 2010s. As a reflection of all this cultural communication and technological change, both curation has become digital and there have been great changes in the economies of cultural heritages. With the spread of blockchain technology, museology has also experienced its most important break throughout the historical process.

In this short period of time that we started to tokenize art, we started to progress very quickly. The idea that Digitalization is not actually a monster has gradually left our minds and we have started to get used to digital art. In financial terms, the argument of 'creating your own economy and community' enabled by blockchain technology brought about common ownership in art and proved to us that the concept of common ownership is just the beginning. This is perhaps the greatest financial invention since the invention of money. Art experts, who knew how to take advantage of this situation, turned the situation in their favor and collected donations for additional income for their museums, new collections, and museum expenses. But the most important point started with the fact that the sense of belonging created by NFTs was built with a community and this situation was beneficial for both humanity and cultural heritage. Strong capitals and family businesses are no longer needed to establish a strong art collection or museum. The way for art history to get rid of monopolies and gatekeepers today is through Correct Coordination and Decentralized Finance. Let's examine how designing this coordination in the right areas can build a museum with a community economy:

We can now tokenize a work of art through NFTs, which offers a democratic approach to the art market and creates a healthy second-hand market for art. If we do this coordination correctly, it is possible to establish a collective museum by not only using one piece of art but more than one work. The concept of common ownership in artworks will establish many museums in the future and these communities will create their own cultures with the economies they have built in the field of art. The economic concept created from the shareholding of works will eventually result in a museum stake. Although this may seem like a Marxist approach, it is in fact a model for creating a liberal arts economy. Because value is determined not by production, but by limited supply and high demand.

While these concepts change the actors of the art economy, they also create new paradigms in terms of art history. The curatorial understanding, especially in the web3 world, moved away from a narrow framework and acquired a new dictionary meaning. From the Roman Empire to the present day, there were two main processes of curation. The first is "Management of Subjects" and the second is "Guardianship of Objects". These two distinctions determined the main duties of the curator throughout history. Using the object and the subject, the curator had to create a new space and make the object special. Now, digital curation expresses a meaning that creates the experience rather than exhibitions, constructing the right coordination and experience together without the need for gallery walls. Culture and art data, which has grown considerably with NFTs, makes it necessary to organize these data. Analyzing, protecting, and storing data are now some of the new duties of web3 curators. At the same time, digital curation can be likened to lifeguards that compile data from a large repository of data and prevent you from drowning. Because the curator, with his knowledge and experience, has the qualifications to create the artistic compilation and experience needed in the web3 field.

Of course, all these approaches are being reshaped around the new paradigm. Common ownership in art and digital curation inevitably compels us to create a new discourse in the field of museology. The collective economy created by the shared ownership of works brings a physical museum with it. In summary, the new museum approaches now include the entire structure and governance, which is built with the technological infrastructure, where each shareholder can decide the future of the museum in terms of management, and equipped with sustainable income models.

These expressions, which cannot be considered in isolation from each other, and the new paradigm create a museum in the history of art that future generations can experience and see, namely the "guardian". Thanks to this technological revolution, works of art are transformed into a cultural communication tool within a museum, experienced, preserved, and passed on to the next generations, instead of being left to their fate.

Art Historian Ogulcan Yildirim

Cultural and artistic accumulation is shaped as a result of our past experiences. Most of the universally accepted works of art were created after great suffering, disasters and wars in human history.

The collapse of Rome had long repercussions in a period of close to a thousand years, and the Renaissance emerged as a result of a process ranging from the crusades to the plague, from famine to invasion. For instance, Delaxroix painted "Liberty Leading the People" after more than 1 million people died in France. In the Spanish Civil War, the Nazis killed 600,000 people so Picasso could draw Guernica. Salvador Dali started painting after the effects of World War I and saw World War II. Nearly 100 million people died in the wars he saw. The surrealism in his paintings was an escape from all these massacres. Francisco Goya painted the paintings “May 2, 1808” and “May 3, 1808” in memory of the Spaniards who resisted Napoleon's armies during the French occupation of Madrid in 1808. Approximately 500 people died in this uprising.

But now it is possible to progress culturally without experiencing these painful experiences, because technological developments have turned these facts and concepts into a digital simulation. The only thing that makes this simulation real and possible is the blockchain itself. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that blockchain is the today proven version of what was imagined in the past.

As a process, although we thought that "Modernity" expanded the areas of freedom in individual, social and political areas of life, we actually ignored the problems in these areas and continued on our way as humanity. We tried to cover all of the financial crises, transparent and unfair public administrations and central authorities, but as the snowball turned into an avalanche, this has become an inevitable and unmanageable big problem over time.

And thus, human history built the 250 years after the Industrial Revolution as an unsustainable and consumption-oriented structure with no future.

We felt the need to create a new space for ourselves with the experiences we had from our cultural backgrounds in this area where social freedom disappeared and areas of individual freedom began to disappear. While creating this space, we decided to build structures where financial crises, transparent and unfair public administration and central authorities that restrict freedoms are not sheltered. Of course, we did this in a modern and technological way. The basis for the emergence of the blockchain was the existence of these problems.

Although it did not arise directly by targeting these problems, the freedom and desire to realize our ideas in our subconscious has brought some of the 8 billion population towards this field at every step. When the books written, academic publications, technological developments, the Internet and the economy were brought together, we started to decentralize finance.

Here, let's compare the central authority and the cryptocurrency ecosystem to see how the change makes a difference. Imagine that ten years ago you physically printed your own dollar in America and used it in many places, you would probably have received one of the harshest sentences in the constitution and you could even be executed under some state laws.

But now we can create our own economy and community for an idea or space of our own dreams. In short, cryptocurrencies have not only brought finance together with the internet and decentralized it, but also liberated it. Saving finance from centralized structures increased not only individual but also social welfare. The rise in the value of cryptocurrencies caused users to dream of a better world instead of more money and take steps to realize it. Of course it's for a very small minority (see: Gitcoin Grants)

"I want to make our world more like Yudkowski's "Dath Ilan" utopia, where wealthy people go to support public goods instead of their wealth signs turning into wasteful, zero-sum nonsense," Vitalik said recently to support projects featured on Gitcoin Grant.

In fact, the point he's talking about here is that he clearly states that personal wealth will not help us change the world the way we want. The abundance of public wealth creates an improved level of social well-being rather than income inequality as in personal wealth. Everyone is free and equal to use that resource. In other words, a social structure is created in which everyone is rich in meeting their needs. A social structure built and enriched by knowledge, without economic tyranny such as monopolizing money.

In fact, the biggest problem is a domino structure created by the global and traditional economy itself, in which all chains do not need each other but are in need. With a simple example; If inflation occurs, purchasing power decreases and prices rise. If prices go up, people start to avoid spending money psychologically and do not spend money other than their basic needs, and culture and art are actually directly affected, not indirectly. The development of blockchain has caused and will continue to cause changes not only in financial terms, but also in the fields of public administration, production models, education and arts.

Because one of the most important elements of Blockchain networks is the consensus mechanism. A consensus mechanism is the way stakeholders validate and secure shared data in a decentralized network. Reconciliation must be achieved so that the blockchain network can verify a transaction and move on to new transactions. For example, let's imagine we vote on the blockchain and if the politicians don't do what they say, we withdraw our votes or start a new vote. When institutions that are not transparent in public administration move to the blockchain, they will be more fair thanks to the transparency of the blockchain. This is possible with Delegated Proof of Stake (DPos). Here is the purely true Athenian Democracy, for eight billion people.

Using blockchain in scientific and academic sense has solutions that will save our education models from these blind structures. Open sources and databases provide a fairer education opportunity for all. Acquiring all these possibilities is less costly or free of charge than traditional buildings.

In terms of art, I think it would be more beneficial to build on the blockchain instead of talking about it too much. There are no traditional institutions, it provides a direct and direct cultural interaction without intermediaries. Blockchain is a resolution mechanism that removes obstacles. Moreover, thanks to digital wallets and identities, the space for movement desired by artists is created. No censorship or restrictions. No one is asking you about your religion, nationality or gender. There is no homophobia or racism. Just concentrate on your art.

Regardless of the identity, gender and faith of the eight billion people, blockchains are the fastest and safest way to build Athens city democracy. We have only just begun to untie the knot. While more than half of the world is using the internet, it would be best to search for the solution on the internet. In order to carry the freedom, equality and the ideal of humanity to the future with a solution-oriented approach, we must transfer all of our motivation and experience to this field, along with life itself.

De-Fi (Decentralized Finance) in economics and finance

DAO, DPos(Delegated Proof of Stake) in the fields of Management, Consensus, Consensus

In the field of Culture and Arts, NFT, F-NFT

In the field of Education, OpenSources, Databases, and this list could go on almost hundreds of lines.

And this list could go on by hundreds of lines.

Human history has made its first and greatest leap through cultural interactions based on geographical discoveries. The second big leap is; It will be thanks to blockchains, open sources and databases. Because this too the interaction form of the digital culture of humanity.

Art Historian Ogulcan Yildirim

This means another development that will prevent us from doubting that NFTs are an investment tool while revealing the usage areas. Moreover, all this happened within minutes and eliminated all the procedures created by traditional financial institutions.

As another usage area, it appeared in the collection exhibition “Tablolarla Boğaziçi’nde Bir Gezinti “ belonging to İşbank, which was opened in Decentraland, an Ethereum-based metaverse, last month. In this way, NFTs kept an inventory record of İşbank's collection and were distributed to visitors as exhibition tickets. These first examples actually give us clear clues about what will happen in the future. Why not carry the ticket required to go to a movie, concert, football match, festival or theater in NFT format in our crypto wallet on our mobile phone? All this wasted paper and time spent filling out forms will disappear with our crypto wallets.

Another key point is in the Global Art Market Report, the report published by Art Basel. According to the report, this digital leap created by the pandemic now accounts for close to 20% of the world art market. As crazy as it sounds, it looks like NFTs will continue to get a slice of the pie. Also, according to Artsy's report, 25% of art galleries plan to sell NFTs within 2022. The fact that galleries, museums, auction houses, culture and art institutions have been closed for 2 years has caused all these institutions to suffer economically, and the process has pushed them to seek a new income and to the market, causing them to seek new ways out. NFT is now the inevitable path the art market must take. Christies and Sotheby's made their most important sales through NFTs in this process. In this way, many art institutions created funds for themselves and tried to get rid of the wounds of the global economic crisis created by the pandemic as quickly as possible.

Of course, while talking about this whole process, it is necessary to talk and explain what NFTs mean not only for the market but also for the artists. We can say that many artists, designers or people with creative abilities who know what they want to do in the real world have overcome most of the problems in the traditional structure with NFTs. Artists and these super talented people are now able to act more authentically and more freely in a production process that focuses on their own potential by eliminating the legal, material and moral problems created and dictated by traditional problems. Of course, this does not apply to artists who want to make money fast. Some of the artists abandon their own practices and focus on marketing by following the trends in order to sell. At one point, they try all kinds of things like "Which one sells?" rather than "What can I tell?" and some young artists end their career for this reason before they even start. In fact, this free movement space gives artists the power to reveal their own potential, and it also means a change for institutions and institutions.

Of course, while talking about this whole process, it is necessary to talk and explain what NFTs mean not only for the market but also for the artists. We can say that many artists, designers or people with creative abilities who know what they want to do in the real world have overcome most of the problems in the traditional structure with NFTs. Artists and these super talented people are now able to act more authentically and more freely in a production process that focuses on their own potential by eliminating the legal, material and moral problems created and dictated by traditional problems. Of course, this does not apply to artists who want to make money fast. Some of the artists abandon their own practices and focus on marketing by following the trends in order to sell. At one point, they try all kinds of things like "Which one sells?" rather than "What can I tell?" and some young artists end their career for this reason before they even start. In fact, this free movement space gives artists the power to reveal their own potential, and it also means a change for institutions and institutions.

It would not be an exaggeration at all if we say that while collectors and institutions determined the market before, this axis is now gradually evolving to a point where the artists produce and the market is determined by the artists. Thanks to NFTs, the torch is no longer in arts institutions. They can't play and edit the game the way they want. That's why they have to adapt, and many art institutions have opened their mouths to keep up with this technology. The role of institutions With blockchain technology, the role of arts institutions has clearly evolved from messiah to apostle. They are no longer followed, but followed. They pay artists millions of dollars, as they should, in order to regain this power.

For this reason, the art sector is democratizing and monopolization ends. Undoubtedly, a great change has begun not only in art but also in every field in the world. Blockchain and NFTs also appear as a solution to a problem in which centralized structures that are clogged and lost their creativity in every field cannot move forward.

All talents who want to break the blockage in the traditional field and create a new form of expression come together on the blockchain and join forces by combining their skills and production practices. This new form of expression has already begun to sprout a new ecosystem, which does not include corporations that spend weeks even in e-mail traffic. With their practices from the past, the artists are already familiar with this form of collective production and it was not difficult for them to adapt. In the current process, we will still see that NFTs will grow a lot in terms of both content and usage area. We are currently in the fire age of NFTs, just like the early examples of the online shopping industry in the late 90's, but the only difference is that we won't have to wait 20 years for NFTs to become this popular, it will all happen in a much shorter time.

So the question we need to ask here is not whether NFTs will enter the market, but which arts institutions will survive? The evolution mechanism works simply. It is not the strong who survive, but the adaptive.

Art Historian Ogulcan Yildirim

Regardless of the subject of this article, if we need to mention the period we live in as a footnote; During this period, the Dada movement emerged. Dada is a cultural and artistic movement, and with the French word meaning “wooden horse”, it wanted to put forward a reaction to the barbarism of war, the intellectual rigidity and eroticism in the field of art and in everyday life, also referring to the meaninglessness of war. We can say that irrationality and the rejection of existing artistic orders are the main characters of Dada. The Dadaists (Jean Arp, Richard Hülsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Jacques Magnifico, Marcel Janco and Emmy Hennings) fell into despair brought about by the war and opposed the aesthetic and value understandings of the middle and upper class socio-culturally.

In all this climate, Malevich saw his cubist painting as a copy of the classics and had to create “something new”. He referred to uniqueness, freeing himself from concepts and objects; He painted the “Black Circle”, in which he found himself in 1913, whose form destroyed light, shadow, composition and object. The piece, measuring 105.5 x 105.5 cm, featured a black circle on a white background. In the following years, he continued the Malevich style, painting the Black Square and the Black Cross. He also used the Suprematist movement to define his abstract geometry paintings and became its pioneer.

Within this psychology, Malevich freed his painting from object-dependent view, object and perspective, almost freeing the canvas from its burdens and painting nothingness. In other words, Malevich’s reaching to nothingness, simplifying his works and simplifying and simplifying by freeing them from the object has not been simple at all.

In short, Malevich was creating his painting by removing form and perspective from his canvas. Just like the French sculptor Rodin created his works by saying “I throw away the excess stone, the sculpture remains”…

In this sense, Pak creates his own style by freeing the chaotic structure from which art and design come from. Its 1-pixel NFT is a clear indication of this artistic practice, and Pak, which is also freed from the burdens of design with the “Merge” that continues, actually goes after the difficult one. The fact that the concepts of simple and plain are a purification that took many years can be clearly seen in Pak’s works.

Like countless names in the history of art, Pak creates his works by getting rid of the burdens of design in order to create his own style and say “something new”. O We see in his work named “Merge” that he went to design not only in his works, but also in the code structure of his NFTs.

NFT named The Merge can be described as an open project consisting of bulk tokens programmed to be merged with others in a single wallet. The project was created in such a way that the higher the bulk purchase rate, the greater the visual quality of the NFTs included in the collection. In addition, airdrops were given to collectors according to their bulk purchase rates. The project was sold to 26 thousand collectors in total. The person holding the most tokens was rewarded with another artifact called “Alpha Mass”.

Pak for Merge; “Depending on the size of the tokens you buy, the artwork will change and have different qualities. All encrypted on-chain, including the metadata.” said.

Art history will not hesitate to write Pak over the years. Because Pak took his place in art history as an artist who “hacked” design with his artistic practice. What makes Pak’s works so valuable is this understanding of design that is freed from its burdens.

Art Historian Ogulcan Yildirim

NFTs first appeared on the Ethereum blockchain. So what is Ethereum? Ethereum, in the simplest terms, is an open platform that allows you to write your own applications, and the ERC-721 standard within this platform also contains a standard that allows you to create your unique tokens, namely NFTs. This standard was first used with Etheria as a gaming on the Ethereum network in 2015, and then continued with EtherRocks and later CryptoPunk in 2017, gaining world fame is the “Everydays: the First 5000 Days” by artist Mike Winkelmann, known under the pseudonym Beeple. His work titled ‘’ was sold for 69.3 million dollars through the Christies auction house. Of course, the retrospective firsts of the NFTs of all recent history may also differ, so the chronological value of the first NFT samples will become anachronistic over time. It doesn’t make much sense to talk about a first directly for the art field.

We can say that Non Fungible Tokens, namely NFTs, are the digital documents of the uniqueness and originality on the blockchain. The realm of NFTs isn’t just about artwork or avatars. an NFT; deed, stock, song, photo, fashion, game, sports, video, jpeg etc. It can have endless content such as This is entirely up to the imagination of the creator.

To say something definite about what it is not, rather than the question of “What is NFT?”; NFT is not an art form. There is no such thing as an NFT artist. NFT is a document of the uniqueness of a work of art on the blockchain. Just like the certificate of authenticity, which includes the inventory record and the wet signature of the artist, given by the gallery or auction house when purchasing a work.

Finally, while making blockchain history as the first cryptos without FUD (a type of black propaganda used to create fear, uncertainty and suspicion) and regulation (rules set by private or public to keep the activities of the industry under control) on the blockchain, it also goes into the history of contemporary art. a new field and market began to emerge.

As it is known, NFTs that became popular last year, Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucination, Tarık Tolunay’s Fractal Istanbul and Murat Pak’s Pixel made a name for themselves. Of course, all the artists named before were producing works focused on technological design and contemporary art. In short, the process did not take place for them with the click of a finger. In addition, the leverage of contemporary art gained momentum with Köenig Gallery in the Decentraland metaverse on the Ethereum network, and Sothebys joined the caravan and signed interesting works, respectively. Auction houses have now started to pay for cryptocurrencies with Bitcoin and Ethereum, and made a special launch for CryptoPunk, one of the first NFT collections, and took its place in the history of the network as the most expensive NFT collection at the time it was held.

Thanks to Blockchain, qualified works found buyers and artists created funds for other works and projects. Just as the contents of NFTs began to be called digital art, the fact that physical works could be sold as NFTs began to become widespread. The most interesting example on this subject was the 3D and 100-frame animation NFT by designer and sculptor Misha Kahn, which went on sale at Christies. This NFT showed that NFTs can have a physical as well as a digital counterpart. With this work of the artist; He created a “furniture” referring to both the “unique form” he designed and the uniqueness of NFTs, thus both physically offering his work on the blockchain base and creating an originality certificate with an NFT for the buyer.

While these developments were taking place in the contemporary art market, there was a really big development for contemporary art on a different network. Banksy’s “Love is in the Air” work, which went on sale at Sotheby’s on May 11, 2021, was sold for 13 million dollars in crypto money, and then we did not hear from the work for a few months.

Then, the work; It was learned that it was purchased by the Particle Collection project in the Avalanche network. Particle Collection, which was established to realize contemporary works of art on a more democratic basis in the field of art investment, stated that it will offer this work as FNFT, Fractionalized NFT (Fractionalized NFT), which is a type of NFTs. Thanks to the FNFTs created by this collection, Banksy’s work will be digitally tokenized with a smart contract created on the blockchain, open to the investment of more than one person. You will be able to manage and diversify at low cost. As we observed in the Particle Collection project, FNFTs will make a name for themselves in the field of contemporary art over time.

So how to make the right NFT investment?

Most NFT projects consist of random mapping of layer drawings to each other hundreds or thousands of times. For this reason, in order to make the right investment, it would be a much more accurate choice to invest in projects that make a name for themselves with the right collaborations, as well as an original NFT project. Because NFTs that contain art content, from the moment they are included in the collection, will turn a community or a company or a high-profile person into an identity that will express their image and brand.

However, it is useful to talk about where NFTs will evolve within the blockchain in the process. This process will inevitably lead NFT investments first to F-NFT formats and then to DAOs. So what does DAO mean after fractional NFTs?

What is DAO?

It stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization in English. These autonomous organizations, decentralized on the blockchain, will eventually become the final pieces of the puzzle for the art market. These decentralized structures are simply democratic decision-making mechanisms within the community within the framework of the rules set by smart contracts. It would be against the spirit of DAOs to think of this organizational structure only for voting purposes. Essentially, the operation of DAOs is determined by the imagination of the creator or creators of that organization. The most important factor that distinguishes DAOs from a classical company or institution structure is that the decision-making mechanism is not pyramid-shaped from top to bottom, but rather like a circle in an Athens city council where everyone has a voice. So why will all the stakeholders of the art market need it?

Art Investment DAO

As I mentioned above; Instead of investing a hefty fund on a piece of art, being a partner in some of it and managing and diversifying your art investments more effectively and at lower cost compared to traditional methods is the subject of DAOs rather than FNFTs. Because it is possible to determine all the rules of a new collective creative economy through codes, thanks to DAOs.

With a simple example; We want to buy a piece of art that has been auctioned off at Sotheby’s and we don’t have the budget for it. An “Art Investment DAO” created within the rules determined by smart contracts on the blockchain will offer us a solution for this. Other users, like us, who do not have a budget but want to buy the work, will also join this DAO, create a pool, create the necessary funds and purchase the work. The future of the work can be determined by the majority decision of the community in the DAO, and it can be kept for investment purposes or it can be operated by re-auction or with different commercial models, generating income and profiting the users within the DAO. These new forms, which are out of the traditional collection management methods, also mean a low cost, democratic decision mechanism and a highly sustainable income model. The right combination of talent, knowledge and funds will undoubtedly shape the future of the art market.

Art Historian Ogulcan Yildirim