Museum of Crypto Art (M○C△) is a digital museum built to preserve, exhibit, and collectively curate art made with blockchain technology.Founded in April 2020 by Colborn Bell and Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile, it developed a virtual reality museum on Somnium Space to show NFTs and crypto art.,Every artwork it holds is backed up, metadata and media file included, onto the Filecoin network.
The museum's early incubator gave artists virtual land in Somnium Space to build and exhibit work using blockchain technology, starting in fall 2020. Its Genesis Collection brought together 160 works by early crypto art artists, developed into a virtual exhibition with co-founder and art historian Shivani Mitra.Bell and Rodriguez-Fraile parted ways as co-founders in January 2021, after which Bell continued running the museum with Mitra. The museum then moved to a community-operated structure organized as a DAO, using a governance token called $MOCA.
The museum operates as a platform for decentralized curation driven by a cypherpunk ethos, giving artists and visitors a role in shaping its collection instead of a small group of experts.,In 2020 it acquired Picasso's Bull (Trevor Jones) by Trevor Jones.Separately, it acquired all four debut SuperRare works by Dave Whyte within 24 hours of their release.It also acquired ten NFTs by Espen Kluge from OpenSea and built a dedicated virtual exhibition space for his work on its Somnium Space parcel with Kate Vass Galerie.
In 2021, curator Eleonora Brizi worked with the museum and Christie's on Hackatao's HACK of a BEAR, created in response to a Leonardo da Vinci drawing offered in Christie's Exceptional Sale that July.That November, the museum collaborated with Kate Vass Galerie and Salomon Arts Gallery on the Bitbasel Bazaar NFT show during NFT.NYC.In 2023, JPG and the museum hosted a rehearsal and performance by Operator at Bathhouse Studios in New York, tied to the duo's Art Blocks debut Human Unreadable.That August, the museum ran a fundraiser bringing together more than 700 artists in a collaborative digital mosaic. The fundraiser also offered a one-of-one companion work, MOCAIC 2023, with a physical print option.
