ProposalsProposal 906
ProposalsProposal 906
Resubmitting due to bug in original candidate.
Season One of a new cultural program designed to bring high level criticism, documentation and dialogue to crypto native art.
Three respected critics, Nora Khan, Brian Droitcour and Jonathan T. D. Neil, will each produce a commissioned essay and appear on Verse Talks. All outputs will be archived on chain as a public good.
This proposal funds one season only.
Web3 excels at creation and speculation. What it lacks is interpretation. The critical layer that turns artworks, collections and cultural movements into history rather than isolated events.
Long form writing, deep context and rigorous critique are rarely produced inside the ecosystem. This initiative fills that gap by bringing world class critics directly into the logic, communities and aesthetic concerns of on-chain art.
For NounsDAO, the value is clear:
funding meaning, not just moments.
Season One creates cultural infrastructure with compounding impact over time.
Season One brings together three of the most influential critical voices working today across digital art, emerging technologies, creative systems and cultural analysis. Their engagement signals to the broader world that on-chain art merits serious interpretation and long-form critique.
Nora Khan is one of the leading thinkers at the intersection of digital art, software, machine learning, and emerging technology. A Harvard and Iowa trained writer and critic, she is known for her hybrid, genre-bending prose and her groundbreaking essay Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence (translated into ten languages).
Her books Seeing, Naming, Knowing and Fear Indexing The X-Files are widely taught in programs focused on AI, digital aesthetics and computational culture. She has been an editor at Rhizome, guest editor at HOLO, and the curator of major exhibitions such as Manual Override at The Shed and A Cosmic Movie Camera at the 2024 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement in Geneva. She has taught at RISD and UCLA and is considered one of the most rigorous minds in contemporary technology driven art criticism.
Brian Droitcour is Editor-in-Chief of Outland, the leading publication dedicated to digital art, creative coding, and AI-assisted practices. He is one of the few critics who has consistently taken on-chain art, generative art and emerging digital aesthetics seriously and critically. Before Outland, he spent seven years as an editor at Art in America, shaping special issues on generative art and the digitised museum. He has published in Artforum, Rhizome, 4Columns, Spike, The New Inquiry and numerous exhibition catalogues.
Brian is equally known for pioneering “vernacular criticism” including his influential early project of reviewing art on Yelp. His work bridges institutional critique, internet culture and emergent digital practices with unusual clarity and accessibility.
Jonathan T. D. Neil brings over 25 years of experience across art criticism, higher education, market analysis, creative entrepreneurship and institutional leadership. He holds a PhD in Art History from Columbia University and has served as Associate Provost and Professor of Art Business & Arts Management at Claremont Graduate University, and as Founding Director of Sotheby’s Institute of Art in Los Angeles.
He co founded Inversion Art, a YC-style accelerator designed to give artists long-term stability through investment, mentorship, and market ecosystems. His writing appears in ArtReview, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, The Art Newspaper, and The Brooklyn Rail, where he edited the Al Held Essays. Neil’s commentary bridges theory, market systems, institutional dynamics, and contemporary aesthetics with unusual breadth.
Together, these critics represent a rare concentration of depth, influence, and cross domain insight. Exactly the calibre of voices capable of meaningfully interpreting the evolution of on chain culture.
Across social platforms alone, core contributors to Verse Talks and its surrounding critical ecosystem collectively maintain a visible audience exceeding 125,000 followers. This, however, reflects only the surface layer of distribution. Their primary and more consequential reach operates through art world institutions, academic discourse, magazines, museum programming, conference circuits, and long form editorial platforms. Channels where audience size is not publicly quantified but where influence historically exceeds social visibility by an order of magnitude through citation, teaching, curation and secondary publication. This layered reach does not simply generate attention; it positions Nouns as an active cultural infrastructure, embedded at the point where meaning is debated, shaped and carried forward. In this context, Nouns is not adjacent to culture and discourse, but structurally central to it.
Each critic will produce a commissioned essay on a theme or phenomenon within crypto native art. I will guide their immersion into artists, collections, communities and the historical context of the space, ensuring the work is culturally grounded and accurate.
Verse will serve as the platform partner, hosting the essays and producing three dedicated Verse Talks podcast episodes to extend each essay into public conversation.
All outputs will be archived on chain.
Week 1
●Funds received
●Critics onboarded
●Season brief circulated
Week 2–3
●Research, interviews, immersion
●Essay drafting
●My review + editorial guidance
Week 4
●All essays delivered
●Verse publishes essays
●Distribution begins (Verse, critics’ Substacks, X, Farcaster)
●Potential supplementary editorial from Outland
Week 5–6
●Record three Verse Talks episodes
●Post-production + editing
Week 7
●Publish podcast episodes
●On-chain/IPFS archival
●Release Season One wrap-up report
●Readership of essays across Verse, Substack, Outland, X
●Podcast listens across the three episodes
●Distribution footprint via Verse + critics’ networks + Farcaster
●Citations, references, follow-up articles
These are visibility indicators, not performance quotas.
All essays and supplementary materials will be released under CC0, ensuring the entire body of work remains an open public good.
Distribution channels include Verse, Substack, X and Farcaster. Each critic will share their work with their existing audiences:
●Nora Khan’s academic + digital art readership
●Brian Droitcour’s Outland network (with potential follow-on pieces)
●Jonathan Neil’s institutional and market-oriented community
This multi platform distribution ensures reach into both crypto-native and mainstream art circles.
If approved, funds will be disbursed automatically by the Nouns DAO treasury contract to:
0x0fA61f5B1975b5b025Ec9644f2dBd3BBbbB27832 (Season of Meaning program 2/3 multisig wallet).
Execution transfers the full 23,000 USDC to the multisig. All milestone based releases (as described below) will occur from this wallet, transparently on chain.
Leadership compensation may remain in ETH to retain alignment with the NounsDAO treasury asset.
Conceptualisation & Intellectual Property Fee = 1.75 ETH (Paid immediately upon proposal funding)
Compensation for originating the program model, developing the proposal, securing the three critics, designing the Season One framework, and defining the intellectual architecture of the initiative. This is the one time strategic fee for creating cultural infrastructure with long term value.
Project Director & Cultural Liaison = 2.5 ETH (Paid in two equal parts. 1.25ETH at kickoff, 1.25 at midpoint)
Full cycle direction across the ~7-week season.
Includes coordinating all parties (critics + Verse), managing schedules, distributing funds, handling communication, ensuring cultural accuracy, and serving as the “guide” through the aesthetic, historical and community logic of crypto-native art.
Editor-in-Chief & Final Production = 1.25 ETH (Paid upon delivery of all three final edited essays to Verse)
Final editorial responsibility for all essays.
Includes deep review, copyediting, fact-checking, formatting, ensuring cohesion across the three texts, and preparing all materials for publication, on chain archival, and broader distribution.
Total Leadership Cost: = 5.5 ETH Updated Total Leadership Cost: = 0 ETH
Commissioning fees for three long-form essays by Nora Khan, Brian Droitcour and Jonathan T.D. Neil. (Paid upon completion and handover of each essay).
Verse will host, format and publish the essays, and produce three dedicated Verse Talks podcast episodes with the critics. (Paid in two tranches: deposit + final delivery).
IPFS/on chain archival plus minor operational overhead. (Paid at project close-out)
●Strengthens Nouns’ position as a patron of culture and interpretation
●Builds permanent cultural infrastructure instead of one off moments
●Leverages top-tier critical voices to contextualise on chain art
●Creates public goods with compounding value
●Expands Nouns’ reach into art, academia, institutions and digital culture
discourse
Nouns have long asked for “the interpretive layer”. This delivers it.
On chain art is historically significant, but significance does not document itself. Season One builds the interpretive scaffolding the ecosystem has been missing, turning creation into culture, and activity into memory.
This initiative positions NounsDAO as a patron of meaning making at a moment when the space needs it most.
Resubmitting due to bug in original candidate.
Season One of a new cultural program designed to bring high level criticism, documentation and dialogue to crypto native art.
Three respected critics, Nora Khan, Brian Droitcour and Jonathan T. D. Neil, will each produce a commissioned essay and appear on Verse Talks. All outputs will be archived on chain as a public good.
This proposal funds one season only.
Web3 excels at creation and speculation. What it lacks is interpretation. The critical layer that turns artworks, collections and cultural movements into history rather than isolated events.
Long form writing, deep context and rigorous critique are rarely produced inside the ecosystem. This initiative fills that gap by bringing world class critics directly into the logic, communities and aesthetic concerns of on-chain art.
For NounsDAO, the value is clear:
funding meaning, not just moments.
Season One creates cultural infrastructure with compounding impact over time.
Season One brings together three of the most influential critical voices working today across digital art, emerging technologies, creative systems and cultural analysis. Their engagement signals to the broader world that on-chain art merits serious interpretation and long-form critique.
Nora Khan is one of the leading thinkers at the intersection of digital art, software, machine learning, and emerging technology. A Harvard and Iowa trained writer and critic, she is known for her hybrid, genre-bending prose and her groundbreaking essay Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence (translated into ten languages).
Her books Seeing, Naming, Knowing and Fear Indexing The X-Files are widely taught in programs focused on AI, digital aesthetics and computational culture. She has been an editor at Rhizome, guest editor at HOLO, and the curator of major exhibitions such as Manual Override at The Shed and A Cosmic Movie Camera at the 2024 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement in Geneva. She has taught at RISD and UCLA and is considered one of the most rigorous minds in contemporary technology driven art criticism.
Brian Droitcour is Editor-in-Chief of Outland, the leading publication dedicated to digital art, creative coding, and AI-assisted practices. He is one of the few critics who has consistently taken on-chain art, generative art and emerging digital aesthetics seriously and critically. Before Outland, he spent seven years as an editor at Art in America, shaping special issues on generative art and the digitised museum. He has published in Artforum, Rhizome, 4Columns, Spike, The New Inquiry and numerous exhibition catalogues.
Brian is equally known for pioneering “vernacular criticism” including his influential early project of reviewing art on Yelp. His work bridges institutional critique, internet culture and emergent digital practices with unusual clarity and accessibility.
Jonathan T. D. Neil brings over 25 years of experience across art criticism, higher education, market analysis, creative entrepreneurship and institutional leadership. He holds a PhD in Art History from Columbia University and has served as Associate Provost and Professor of Art Business & Arts Management at Claremont Graduate University, and as Founding Director of Sotheby’s Institute of Art in Los Angeles.
He co founded Inversion Art, a YC-style accelerator designed to give artists long-term stability through investment, mentorship, and market ecosystems. His writing appears in ArtReview, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, The Art Newspaper, and The Brooklyn Rail, where he edited the Al Held Essays. Neil’s commentary bridges theory, market systems, institutional dynamics, and contemporary aesthetics with unusual breadth.
Together, these critics represent a rare concentration of depth, influence, and cross domain insight. Exactly the calibre of voices capable of meaningfully interpreting the evolution of on chain culture.
Across social platforms alone, core contributors to Verse Talks and its surrounding critical ecosystem collectively maintain a visible audience exceeding 125,000 followers. This, however, reflects only the surface layer of distribution. Their primary and more consequential reach operates through art world institutions, academic discourse, magazines, museum programming, conference circuits, and long form editorial platforms. Channels where audience size is not publicly quantified but where influence historically exceeds social visibility by an order of magnitude through citation, teaching, curation and secondary publication. This layered reach does not simply generate attention; it positions Nouns as an active cultural infrastructure, embedded at the point where meaning is debated, shaped and carried forward. In this context, Nouns is not adjacent to culture and discourse, but structurally central to it.
Each critic will produce a commissioned essay on a theme or phenomenon within crypto native art. I will guide their immersion into artists, collections, communities and the historical context of the space, ensuring the work is culturally grounded and accurate.
Verse will serve as the platform partner, hosting the essays and producing three dedicated Verse Talks podcast episodes to extend each essay into public conversation.
All outputs will be archived on chain.
Week 1
●Funds received
●Critics onboarded
●Season brief circulated
Week 2–3
●Research, interviews, immersion
●Essay drafting
●My review + editorial guidance
Week 4
●All essays delivered
●Verse publishes essays
●Distribution begins (Verse, critics’ Substacks, X, Farcaster)
●Potential supplementary editorial from Outland
Week 5–6
●Record three Verse Talks episodes
●Post-production + editing
Week 7
●Publish podcast episodes
●On-chain/IPFS archival
●Release Season One wrap-up report
●Readership of essays across Verse, Substack, Outland, X
●Podcast listens across the three episodes
●Distribution footprint via Verse + critics’ networks + Farcaster
●Citations, references, follow-up articles
These are visibility indicators, not performance quotas.
All essays and supplementary materials will be released under CC0, ensuring the entire body of work remains an open public good.
Distribution channels include Verse, Substack, X and Farcaster. Each critic will share their work with their existing audiences:
●Nora Khan’s academic + digital art readership
●Brian Droitcour’s Outland network (with potential follow-on pieces)
●Jonathan Neil’s institutional and market-oriented community
This multi platform distribution ensures reach into both crypto-native and mainstream art circles.
If approved, funds will be disbursed automatically by the Nouns DAO treasury contract to:
0x0fA61f5B1975b5b025Ec9644f2dBd3BBbbB27832 (Season of Meaning program 2/3 multisig wallet).
Execution transfers the full 23,000 USDC to the multisig. All milestone based releases (as described below) will occur from this wallet, transparently on chain.
Leadership compensation may remain in ETH to retain alignment with the NounsDAO treasury asset.
Conceptualisation & Intellectual Property Fee = 1.75 ETH (Paid immediately upon proposal funding)
Compensation for originating the program model, developing the proposal, securing the three critics, designing the Season One framework, and defining the intellectual architecture of the initiative. This is the one time strategic fee for creating cultural infrastructure with long term value.
Project Director & Cultural Liaison = 2.5 ETH (Paid in two equal parts. 1.25ETH at kickoff, 1.25 at midpoint)
Full cycle direction across the ~7-week season.
Includes coordinating all parties (critics + Verse), managing schedules, distributing funds, handling communication, ensuring cultural accuracy, and serving as the “guide” through the aesthetic, historical and community logic of crypto-native art.
Editor-in-Chief & Final Production = 1.25 ETH (Paid upon delivery of all three final edited essays to Verse)
Final editorial responsibility for all essays.
Includes deep review, copyediting, fact-checking, formatting, ensuring cohesion across the three texts, and preparing all materials for publication, on chain archival, and broader distribution.
Total Leadership Cost: = 5.5 ETH Updated Total Leadership Cost: = 0 ETH
Commissioning fees for three long-form essays by Nora Khan, Brian Droitcour and Jonathan T.D. Neil. (Paid upon completion and handover of each essay).
Verse will host, format and publish the essays, and produce three dedicated Verse Talks podcast episodes with the critics. (Paid in two tranches: deposit + final delivery).
IPFS/on chain archival plus minor operational overhead. (Paid at project close-out)
●Strengthens Nouns’ position as a patron of culture and interpretation
●Builds permanent cultural infrastructure instead of one off moments
●Leverages top-tier critical voices to contextualise on chain art
●Creates public goods with compounding value
●Expands Nouns’ reach into art, academia, institutions and digital culture
discourse
Nouns have long asked for “the interpretive layer”. This delivers it.
On chain art is historically significant, but significance does not document itself. Season One builds the interpretive scaffolding the ecosystem has been missing, turning creation into culture, and activity into memory.
This initiative positions NounsDAO as a patron of meaning making at a moment when the space needs it most.