New World Order?

Sedition has two platforms for artists — an Open Platform, which everyone can join, and a Curated Platform, which is invitation-only, you have to be invited to be there and your artworks have to be approved by our curatorial team. At the same time however, Sedition has started to use permissionless blockchain technology. Crypto and blockchain communities are adamant that everything, starting from money and ending with social media, needs to be permissionless and decentralized. So, how do you merge the two? Can the two even be merged?

First of all, it is worth noting that Sedition is not interested in decentralizing every aspect of society, it is neither our mission, our ideology, nor even a belief that it’s even possible (or desirable!) On the ideological spectrum Sedition is very far from the gun-wielding, climate change denying, fossil fuel loving, government hating, vaccine-fearing fanatics of certain cryptocurrencies. You could even say that we are at the opposite end of the spectrum, certainly in regards to our team and most, if not all, of our community. So, why would Sedition step into the blockchain and NFT space, if the values on display there heavily contradict our own?

Well let’s start by setting some facts straight. Whilst the use of cryptocurrency was indeed started by cypherpunks advocating for stronger privacy as a route towards social and political change, a lot of people in the crypto community are not quite as fanatical. According to research, over 100 million people have used crypto — some for day trading, some for investing, some as a way to send money overseas, some for a totally legitimate use case that we’ve never even heard of… and yes, some have used it as a way to stay anonymous and to facilitate heinous crimes. But this is not so very dissimilar to many other things in daily use — according to studies, cash is more often used to facilitate illicit transactions than crypto, and the reason for this is obvious — cash is also anonymous and is even less traceable than crypto. A knife can be used to cut vegetables or it can be used to stab someone. A gun can be used to stop a mass murderer or it can be used to commit mass murder. A spoon can be used to mix tea or to boil heroin. You get the point… In and of themselves, crypto, cash, knives, guns, spoons or whatever else are not evil, but all of them can be used for good or bad ends. Nothing is bad or ‘evil’ in and of itself. There are many more innocent use cases for crypto than nefarious uses, and since most of the community are not hardcore fanatics it is hard not to acknowledge some of the benefits.

At Sedition, we are not interested in the underlying ideology or in the anarchist vision of the world shared by some early adopters of crypto — we’re interested in the technology and the benefits that it offers to artists and to art collectors, of which there are many. Transparent and traceable ownership, the ability to uniquely identify an endlessly reproducible asset, the independence to operate without reliance upon a centralized entity such as Sedition, and most excitingly — the capture of a fair resale value for artist’s work in perpetuity — NFTs are a long overdue development for the art world.

Now that we are decentralizing ownership and using blockchain technology, the question arises — is Sedition going to decentralize itself? Is Sedition moving towards a DAO model, community curation or removing the curatorial aspect altogether — an aspect supposedly incompatible with the blockchain model? The answer to all of these questions is NO!

At Sedition, we believe there are great advantages to a certain degree of centralization and especially for curation in the artworld. In fact, we want to impose some traditional curatorial values onto the open sea of choices currently evident in the NFT space. We want to use the blockchain technology in order to bring benefits to artists and collectors since we believe that it is the best technology available for what we are trying to achieve. But none of this in any way affects the overarching mission of Sedition — we’re about fine art and artists. No shiny new tech, however exciting, is going to change that.