Founded by Todd Goldberg and Andrew Jiang, Curated® is a cryptonative fund that collects works of crypto art and culture that its curators find exceptional. Seeking to build a digitally native institution that stewards pieces and supports their creators, Goldberg and Jiang are assembling a collection guided by aesthetic taste, as well as their assessments of cultural significance and technical excellence.

Jordan Kantor: Hi Todd, Hi Andrew. It’s great to get acquainted in this context. We are always keen to highlight different members of the Art Blocks community and ecosystem, and welcome you to inaugurate what we hope will be an occasional series on collecting. For those who aren’t familiar with this initiative, can you please tell us a bit about Curated® and how you came to include Art Blocks works in the collection?

Todd Goldberg: Curated® is an investment fund that collects exceptional crypto art and culture. We are long-term collectors with the goal of making our provenance significant through thoughtful curation and active community involvement. Our collection leans heavily on generative art, along with CryptoPunks, and select 1-of-1 digital art. 

We both come from tech backgrounds and met through the startup accelerator Y Combinator. (Fun fact: Dmitri Cherniak was in my batch—we were both working on our own companies at the time). I was also an early builder in the NFT ecosystem back in 2018 where I had built a few experimental products including the first NFT gallery app. Andrew introduced me to the collector side of things in late 2020 and we’ve been collecting together ever since. We eventually collected our first CryptoPunk together and, as we rapidly accelerated from there, the rest is history. Over time, we discovered generative art through a few initial collections on Art Blocks (Archetype, Chromie Squiggles, Rapture). They helped us form early excitement and conviction around on-chain generative art.

Andrew Jiang: We like to say that because we spent all our personal ETH on JPEGs, we had to go and raise funds for Curated® to scale up our collecting! Our investors include many crypto founders, creators, and investors. We started collecting through Curated® in 2022—right around when the market crashed (lucky timing!). Now in the depths of the bear market, we are quite active as we work to build the highest signal collection and push the space forward. A lot of our time is spent looking at generative art algorithms, many of which are minted through Art Blocks, and discussing how to best collect them.

JK: Can you describe the curatorial logic that has governed your acquisition process? Do you have an overarching theme, or specific area of collecting interest?

AJ: Curated® is a fund with a ten year plus time horizon. Given this frame, we only collect digital objects that we believe are likely to grow in cultural significance over the next decade. We are patient in building our own conviction around artists and collections. The upside of a long time frame is that it makes it easy to ignore short-term hype cycles. If something is going to be meaningful a decade from now, it will still be meaningful in the months or years after being minted. Crypto has a short memory, especially during a bear market, so we believe being patient and price sensitive is an advantage.

TG: We didn’t begin with an overarching theme, but over the past year we have converged on generative art, digital art from cryptonative artists, and CryptoPunks as our highest conviction categories. There are layers of nuance in how we collect across categories, but it always has to pass the bar of “do we like it aesthetically?” For generative art, we view collecting the algorithm as important. To best represent this, we work to curate a cohesive collection of different outputs that show its range and strength. This includes understanding the key traits (implicit and explicit), edges of the algorithm (i.e., rare features and grails), and culture and community lore.

JK: That is a significant distinction you mention here, Todd: to think about collecting the algorithm itself, with the outputs as examples of its range, as opposed to strictly on their own terms. Can each of you mention a project, represented by multiple outputs in the collection, which clearly shows the range and diversity you are looking for?

TG: Two characteristics of projects we enjoy: (1) diverse, but cohesive enough to know you’re still looking at outputs from the same algorithm; and (2) the versatility of the algorithm is a key input into the size of the collection.

Some algorithms have enough range and depth that they can easily handle 1,000 outputs, while others might be better served in the low 100s. Fidenza is a great example because there are so many unique edges to explore, even with 999 minted outputs. Tyler ensured a balance between having the most visually interesting traits (e.g. Luxe Palette) be quite common—which we consider the center of the algorithm—and small quantities of edge traits (e.g., Micros, White on Cream Palette) that don’t require many outputs to fully appreciate.

AJ: Memories of Qilin by Emily Xie is another great example where you see an incredible range of the algorithm, especially across composition and palette. There are fifteen palettes that each feel visually distinct, while staying cohesive to the collection. And there are clear differences amongst the composition types, but they all stay true to the visual goal, evoking imagery from East Asian mythology.

Ultimately, the importance of range and diversity all depends on how well the algorithm fits the artist’s intent. Just as Fidenza was created to be Tyler’s “most versatile generative algorithm,” Incomplete Control explores cohesion and is able to communicate the full expression in one-hundred pieces.

JK: You have previously mentioned a methodical process for developing conviction about artists and projects. What can you share about that approach?

AJ: I don’t know if there is a prescriptive way that we develop conviction, but we definitely are guided by three main principles:

First, we need to aesthetically love the work. There are quite a few projects whose significance we recognize that we can’t get ourselves to collect simply because of our own aesthetic taste. Plenty of collectors might disagree, but that’s what makes collecting such a raw and personal experience for us. 

Second, we need to believe that the artist will have a significant place in the story of the art of this time period. Quite often we’re collecting works where the artist or collection is already considered significant within our ecosystem. Often this is due to their contribution to the early history of digital art or generative art. If they’re not (yet), we try to assess how the artist’s career and reputation might develop in time. Since that is very hard to predict, we don’t do it as often.  

Finally, we look for as few dependencies as possible—whether that’s technical, social or otherwise. Technically, that means favoring more durable blockchains and on-chain art. We appreciate work minted on Art Blocks in no small part because the art has minimal technical dependencies and can forever be reproduced from its on-chain code.

Socially, we appreciate that it’s very easy for artists and projects to take a wrong step and have the community turn sour on them (more likely for PFP/collectibles). One reason we love Autoglyphs and CryptoPunks is that the creators have literally stepped away and yet we still value and appreciate the art. 

JK: Can you talk a bit more about what drives your belief in generative art in terms of contemporary art discourses? 

TG: Both of us come from tech backgrounds and have spent our careers around code. It’s hard to overstate just how significant technology has been to this generation and the ones to come. When we first started collecting generative art, it felt natural and intuitive as we’re used to code being crafted for applications and products. Generative art made us appreciate that code could also be used to craft something aesthetically pleasing. In particular, our conviction is in on-chain generative art as it’s uniquely enabled by the blockchain. It is co-created with the artist, stored and owned on the blockchain, and can live on to be reproduced forever. To collect a piece of generative art is to collect both the code along with the specific output.

JK: What are your favorite projects, and can you describe what you like about them technically and/or aesthetically? 

TG: For me, it was Kjetil Golid’s Archetypes that largely pulled me into generative art. It caught my eye even before I fully understood on-chain generative art and what Art Blocks was as a platform. The combination of diverse color palettes and clean geometric shapes, often in a repeating pattern, made it stand out. Archetype #243 was also the first piece of generative art I printed and framed for my home. Today, Archetypes is one of our most deeply collected algorithms. We think we’ve collected every major edge of it. 

AJ: I really admire the catalog of work from Deafbeef. There is something satisfying about art created from low level code with very few dependencies. In particular, I love Entropy (Series 3) from the original contract, which uses code to explore concepts around ownership and permanency. By creating digital artwork that degrades upon every transfer, it speaks to the vulnerability and degradation of physical artwork. Also I can’t say enough about Caves (we own #1!) from his second contract which revealed the generative art in beloved games from my childhood.

JK: What advice would you give to someone just beginning to establish a collection?

AJ: Having a long-term time horizon is the best advantage you can have. It gives you the time to study and appreciate collections and their artists. It gives you a much longer window of opportunity to acquire the outputs that speak to you. And it gives you patience and perspective not to chase after every hype cycle. 

Take that extra time to do your homework. You don’t need to be an existing collector to engage with artists and the community. Simply appreciating the art is enough—and you’ll find that there is an open and welcoming culture in this space. Everyone wants to help, whether it’s sharing insights, talking about their favorite projects, or even providing suggestions on which pieces they like and why. 

JK: Yes, it is true you don’t need to collect to engage. That’s great advice. With the benefit of hindsight, what, if anything, would you have done differently relative to your collection in the last two years?

TG:  We thoroughly enjoy Chromie Squiggles and what they represent. While we already have over sixty in the collection today, we do wish we had built that conviction earlier on!

AJ: Besides that, we’ve come to appreciate just how real the power laws (i.e., where a tiny percentage captures an overwhelming share of impact and value) are within art across artists, collections, and outputs. We might have converged even faster in concentrating our collection amongst our highest conviction artists and projects.

JK: What are your long-term plans for the collection?

TG: Step one for us was to build one of the highest signal collections in the world. I think we’ve made meaningful progress towards that goal so far. However, the collective universe of digital art collectors is quite small today. Going forward, we believe our work is around both highlighting the collection in unique ways and open sourcing our thinking to help others better understand why digital art is meaningful. Ultimately, we want to help the space grow significantly larger and, if that happens, for Curated’s® provenance to become highly valued.

JK: Thank you both for your time and attention. It’s been a pleasure to learn more about your collection and its guiding principles. What is the best way for folks to learn more about Curated®?

TG: Thanks for inviting us! The two best places are our site, Curated.xyz, which includes our collection, as well as @CuratedXYZ on Twitter where we share new acquisitions.

AJ: Thank you! It’s been fun.