The Curated! 101
Still struggling with navigating Web3 art? Too many platforms, thousands of simultaneous new mints, weak credibility of professional opinions… We feel your pain. “How can we make the digital art experience smooth and comfortable?”, – this was the first question that came to a group of contemporary art professionals who sat to think out the design of The Curated, a new Web3 platform they had just found.
The overwhelming flood of new art and a lack of handy navigating tools are common issues both for newcomers and art professionals who have just started their journey in digital art. Giving convenient instruments in their hands to bring order to this chaotic space, catalog artwork, and get curatorial guidance is a central idea of The Curated as a platform.
You may notice that Pinterest is solving similar problems for millions of users in Web2. In Web3, The Curated is essentially filling the gap in convenient social curation services, removing barriers for art lovers entering this new space. It also drastically improves navigating digital and generative art for Web3-natives and engages them in decentralized curating, a new yielding form of social interaction for Web3 users.
Keep reading to learn how exactly all these features benefit you and why The Curated is not a marketplace but a new decentralized institution.
Web3 Art Browser
The first platform feature you may run into is the place where you can explore art sourced from all over Web3 — major marketplaces, generative art networks, and direct submissions by artists, collectors, and galleries. Meanwhile, submission to The Curated can be a great opportunity for generative artists (they can expect quick feedback for their algorithms) and for collectors who can significantly improve the provenance of their favorite artworks.
You can apply filters and search for artworks by multiple parameters, including medium and prices. The lineup of filters will be expanding, so eventually, you can feel as if you are browsing pictures in a good old search engine (but still powerful, isn’t it?).
Personalized Art Boards
Here we are arriving at the most interesting part. What if you found something outstanding and you want to save it immediately so it doesn’t get lost (how this already happened to hundreds of your other findings on other platforms)?
Here are our mighty art boards coming to rescue your favored pieces. You can create a board with one click, set a specific topic for it, and start organizing your favorite art by saving each piece to your boards. You will be able to get back to your favorites anytime and even share boards on your social media to showcase them at all brilliance.
Curator’s Choices
You may turn any of your boards into a full-fledged curator’s art selection by adding comments to artworks and sharing this as an editorial with the world. The Curated runs a dedicated section with selected Curator’s choices created by established art curators and featuring selections approved by our curatorial council.
Besides giving an opportunity to show off your curatorial skills, the platform rewards users whose art selections got featured in the Curator’s Choice section.
Rate & Earn
Yes, we value your opinion and reward you for expressing it on the platform. You can rate any artwork you find on The Curated by hitting either ‘GEM’ if you think it’s a masterpiece or ‘No’ if you don’t like it.
The platform offers scores for your active participation. If your opinion matches our curators, your score is adjusted. This is how The Curated streamlines collective efforts to identify true Art Gems by joint consensus.
The Curated Feed
The Curated Feed is the ultimate feature of The Curated that puts together all pieces – choices, rate&earn, and others. It consists of artworks approved by the communal consensus and established curators with museum and contemporary art backgrounds.
Collectors can be sure that all artworks in the Feed have passed extensive screening with multiple professional eyeballs on each piece. They can find all the necessary information about each artwork on the platform and acquire it right from The Curated (even if it was sourced from another marketplace – no need to navigate there). We are confident that this approach will save tons of browsing time for collectors.
Decentralized Curating
Having said that, the platform is designed to streamline efforts by everyone from its community to detect outstanding and history-shaping art pieces. But what exactly does this mean?
We call the process presented in the diagram above a ‘decentralized curating’. It starts with sourcing artworks from almost everywhere. Regular users help curators of the platform identify relevant pieces by participating in the Rate&Earn program explained earlier. So-called verified curators (users who submitted their applications and have proven their qualifications) can highlight artworks directly for the curatorial council, which has the final say in this communal consensus.
As you can see, the curatorial council plays an important role in this process. In a nutshell, it’s a body that includes only professional contemporary art curators. The Chief Curator appoints 50% of the council, while The Curated DAO elects the remaining 50% through transparent elections held every quarter. The council reviews submissions for the Curator’s Choice section as well as artworks to be approved for the platform.
We believe curating will make the Web3 art space more accessible, diverse, researched, and structured. Reinventing real-world curating turns The Curated into a tastemaker and real institution.
How you can participate now
To coincide with the launch, we are making an open call for digital art curators and museum curators who would like to explore the Web3 space. They should submit short bios and curatorial statements and create art selections based on chosen topics.
All applicants with a proven curatorial track record will be accepted as verified curators and rewarded for platform activities (such as discovering artworks subsequently approved by the curatorial council, creating curatorial selections, etc.). A jury will select ten applications by curators who will become top candidates to be elected onto the curatorial council by The Curated DAO.
Submit your application now
