SLOTHICORN
A Creative Catalyst for Cryptoartists
“When it comes to art, money is an unimportant detail. It just happens to be a huge unimportant detail.” — Iggy Pop
IN THE BEGINNING
In 2017, renowned cryptoartist Stellabelle sought to address a question posed by artists and creatives for millenia: How does one reconcile their artistic vision and process with the need to sustain a livelihood? As an artist who managed to overcome multiple obstacles throughout her career, including poverty, addiction, rejection and at least one date with a serial killer (for a poignant and in-depth look at how she persevered through adversity, check out her book, Un-Crap Your Life) Stellabelle felt compelled to help artists empower themselves and avoid some of the more common pitfalls encountered by the creative community. But the toughest question remained: How?
In theory, and to many creatives, art and money are often in direct opposition to one another. We create art to articulate our human condition; to address the philosophical and ontological questions that go beyond our corporeal realm. We compose and architect our artistic vision in the name of truth, beauty, authenticity, and honesty. But money? Money, the noble artist will maintain, shouldn’t enter the sphere of creativity. Money poisons art. Money compromises our medium. We’ve all heard these arguments ad nauseum, but in the end, sentiments like these are all just sound and fury. We all wish we could create in a cosmic vacuum, but as the saying goes, “Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.”
Realizing a need to bridge the divide between artistic integrity and steady income, Stellabelle hit upon a way to expose more people to compelling artwork and at the same time endeavor the artists themselves to benefit from a decentralized — and profitable — ecosystem. The answer presented itself in the form of a magical sloth born on a slice of pizza. A sloth who, according to Slothicorn Historian Max Webber, “believes Humanity is all about creativity, prosperity and collaboration.”
And thus, the sloth bleat-squeaked its vision for the future of art, artists and opportunity, which was then articulated and transmitted via a brainwave-AI machine…
THE WAY OF THE SLOTHICORN
Using the social blockchain Steem (before it’s fork to Hive), Stellabelle cultivated a large and devoted following as both an artist and writer. Always eager to help her fellow artists, and capitalizing on this broad sphere of influence on the Steem platform, she began to architect the Slothicorn Solution in earnest. And while Stellabelle is reticent to discuss the particulars of what the Slothicorn communicated to her, artists and creatives were soon creating — and earning — under the Slothicorn aegis.
In essence, Slothicorn was put in place to “monetarily reward artistic contributions and encourage artists to contribute to Creative Commons.” By using a decentralized model that eschewed the standard approach to copyrights (and by the transitive property, the standard approach to compensating artists for their work) members of the Slothicorn tribe could, depending on platform support for their efforts, create and submit their cryptoart for payment in the form of the cryptocurrency STEEM. Up until this point, submitting work to the Creative Commons had been an exercise in pro bono benevolence, but driven by the bank failings and widespread fraud uncovered in 2008, Slothicorn slowly but surely showed its claws.
“I founded Slothicorn because I saw a great need within the decentralized, blockchain world for a new culture of radical sharing and synthesizing,” says Stellabelle. “Slothicorn is built to meet the needs of artists who want to contribute to the emerging decentralized cryptoart movement.”
Through a growing network of cryptoartists and NFT creators, Slothicorn, by virtue of its decentralized DNA, gave owners within the tokenized community a way to become active shareholders, participants and owners in a common artistic endeavor. And, by providing unique incentives divorced from a centralized business model, artists and creatives could find a new means to income without compromising their artistic integrity.
“Blockchain and cryptocurrency communities are able to properly align human behavior and economic incentives,” says Stellabelle. “Artists and creative thinkers can become a force for good by adding to the shared economy and in the process, be monetarily rewarded for their contributions…via an algorithm instead of a centralized entity.”
By focussing on cryptoart and the cryptoart community, Slothicorn was also instrumental in bringing what was often seen as a marginalized medium into the mainstream. Today, there are over 6,000 different cryptocurrencies “in circulation,” which is 4X more than in 2017, and yet, there are still only a handful that feature and/or incorporate cryptoart in a compelling and meaningful way. Nevertheless, the spirit of Slothicorn continues to pave the way for countless cryptoartists in finding a creative niche and a supportive community onchain, as opportunities for monetization and stakeholder/ownership reveal themselves more and more.
Likewise, it’s safe to say that with recent auctions at Christies and Sotheby’s, along with some astronomical sums paid by individuals for works of cryptoart, the larger public sphere has begun not only to accept cryptoart as a viable medium, but also to embrace the ethos of decentralization and the notion of stake-weighted systems as a more egalitarian way of moving forward. Right now, it seems as if every day brings about a sea change in both how, when, where, and yes, even why art is appreciated, and it is because of initiatives and DAOs like Slothicorn that crypto and NFT artists have the latitude to experiment and create work that goes beyond the provincial definitions of how art should be experienced.
Moving forward, it’s essential for cryptoart and artists to stay one step ahead of the stultifying corporate machine and form collectives similar to Slothicorn. For one, this will ensure that creatives are given autonomy over their work and their income. And secondly, to continue the collective vision of the blockchain in building a more equitable world, one in which social impact takes center stage and where artists can be truly invested in their creations and engaged in an ecosystem that rewards their work in myriad ways.
As for the future of Slothicorn, who knows? Stellabelle is an artist who always keeps us on our toes, and so one day soon, don’t be surprised if out of the shadows trundles a curious, horned creature with a new, refined message of unity and symbiotic collaboration that moves the NFT and crypto communities ever closer to the meritocratic and sustainable economic paradigm we’ve all worked so hard to achieve.
To learn more about Stellabelle and her artistic vision, or to view/purchase her work, visit here.
For the latest news and discussion on current and upcoming projects, including her satirical pfp project, CryptoStellas, step in to the Discord.
