In Conversation with GrailersDAO: Curating Ordinals

Leyla Fakhr, Artistic Director of Verse, in conversation with sssluke, Artistic Director of GrailersDAO, discussing the role of Grailers within the digital art space, and their upcoming exhibition, All at Once, curated alongside Singular.

Where does Grailers place curating exhibitions within the context of being a DAO? Do you see yourselves more as patrons, collectors, or a collaborative gallery?

Grailers is first and foremost a community with a focus on elevating all forms of blockchain based art. Our discord has been an active place with high quality discussion for almost three years. We have a very broad church of members from all sides of the space and our members seem very curious about any new trends or evolutions.

When we were first initiated, the focus was solely on generative art, and while that is still a deep focus over time our interests have developed to other metas such as AI, Terraforms or Ordinals. It is a very open minded place where people are encouraged to ask questions and share knowledge on various topics around blockchain art.

The curation arm of the DAO is just an extension of this community. We are interested in putting out high quality and thoughtful releases rather than flooding the eco system with drops. Hopefully that is evident by our recent roster of drops, Uncomputer at Unit London, Fold by Rudxane, Atlas by Eric De Giuli, Alternate by Kim Asendorf, and now this show. In each case we try to engage and empower each artist about how they really want to structure a release, so we try to be open minded about that. 

As a DAO we do collect some art but it is less of a focus compared to some of the bigger DAOs. There are a lot of active collectors in our DAO so collectively we do identify as a DAO of collectors alongside all the artists that also hang out in our Discord. 

In a time where there has been a plethora of Ordinal releases, it seems you are using this exhibition as an opportunity to fully explore the potential of the medium. Can you speak more about this and the DAO's thoughts on Ordinals in general?

There have been a lot of releases on Ordinals, but we haven’t seen many with a developed curatorial approach. With Uncomputer last year we developed a curatorial theme and gave the artists a few months to make work in response to it. This process opened up many new directions for these artists that they are still working on today.

We thought it would be interesting to try and recreate that in the Ordinals space. It was obvious that there were many talented artists and unique aspects to the Ordinal technology and we wanted to contribute a place for that to be celebrated. We also hope this exhibition will provide an opportunity for many of those curious about ordinals to become more educated about them.

Not everyone in our DAO has shifted their interest in Ordinals, but our Ordinals channel has become very active. This is not us shifting to a new meta, but just trying to be open minded about how different mediums of blockchain can be critically explored. 

How did artists react to the exhibition’s theme? Were they immediately receptive, or did they have hesitations?  

The theme of chronology and time is quite an obvious one as time is so intrinsic to Bitcoin's function. So most of the artists immediately connected with the theme and it was broad enough for them to express their personalities within the topic. 

We spent a long time developing the theme with the talented writer Kevin Buist and tried to give this topic as much art historical context as possible. In Kevin’s article which will be released on Outland, he touches on many iconic works that have explored this theme such as Christian Marclay’s The Clock and Felix Gonzalez’s Perfect Lovers… many of the artists knew these works well and found them to be inspiring focal points. 

What criteria did you use to select the artists for this exhibition? How did you discover them, and what made them essential to your curation?

We wanted to create an even split of artists who had been making blockchain art pre-Ethereum, Ordinal native artists, and a couple who had yet to inscribe but had shown enthusiasm to do so and who’s style seemed to fit the theme. Aesthetically there is a wide range in the selection. It was more about selecting artists who had a strong voice and a deep conceptual underpinning to their work. 

How do you anticipate collectors will respond to the conceptual approach many of the works take towards the theme?

Good question. Some of the works are primarily conceptual gestures, so we hope some collectors connect with this as well as the works that are more obviously aesthetic. At the same time that is not for everyone and that is fine. But I don’t think anyone will be able to accuse the artworks of lacking depth to them. 

Your collaboration with Singular and Verse is quite exciting. How did this partnership come about, and why are partnerships important to Grailers?

Proper who runs Singular is an old school Grailer and one of the most knowledgable people about Ordinals in the space. So when we started thinking about this show it made sense to partner with him not only for his technical skills but for his curatorial vision. Ordinals is a very nascent and complicated technology that needs a lot of guidance, and it would have been impossible to do this show without Singular’s expertise here. Partnerships often make sense for us as we are not a company or a business but a community of collectors so it makes sense to partner with people for certain projects. 

What are your thoughts on the future direction of digital art, and what goals does Grailers have in this evolving landscape?

We see this as an exciting time to think laterally about how best to contribute to the wider eco system. We hope that our active and supportive discord provides a helpful place for artists and collectors to congregate. I think we are still a long way away from blockchain based art being truly accepted as an art medium by the art world, so in the meantime we hope we can provide good support and great curation to help us get there one day. And if not that is also ok, we are all having fun and enjoying what we love!