The curator

Give it a collection and it looks at every work — subject, palette, handling, what the thing seems to be about — and then proposes exhibitions built out of what the works have in common. Give it a theme and it works to the theme. Give it nothing and it has to find its own reason, which is the harder and more interesting half.

It reads the chain rather than a marketplace, so any ERC-721 works — a Manifold contract, a Transient Labs contract, your own — and Tezos comes through Objkt. It also reads the Met, Cleveland and the Art Institute, who give their collections away. Nothing is minted, nothing is bought, and nothing you point it at is stored beyond a description of the pictures.

Click any work and it finds that work’s kin, answering twice: the closest things by other artists working now, and the closest things in a museum. The second is the more interesting one — a glitched self-portrait minted last week has ancestors, and they are four hundred years old and free to look at. The pool grows as the tool is used: every work it reads becomes something a later work can be paired with.

Or start from an image you have. Upload a photograph of a painting, a screenshot, something unfinished — it gets looked at the same way, and if nothing already read resembles it the tool goes and searches the museums on what it saw, reads what comes back, and answers from that. Nothing needs to be minted, or on a chain, or done.

An uploaded image is not pinned, not stored, and never joins the pool anyone else searches; it is resized in your browser first, so the camera, the timestamp and the location never leave your machine. And only contracts join that pool at all — a contract is a published body of work, a wallet is a person’s shelf, and pointing this at your own holdings is not the same as offering them up as somebody else’s search results.

Three searches a day are free. After that a search is $1 in ETH on Base, paid to the gallery and spent on the API bill — a search is up to nine looks at pictures plus a reasoning pass, and that is what the dollar is for. No card and no account: a collector here has always been allowed to be nobody in particular, and buying a search is not going to be the first thing that asks for a name.

What comes out is a proposal sheet, not a show. This gallery’s one rule is anonymity for the maker and credit for the eye — so the machine does the looking, and the curator who picks, cuts and hangs is the one whose name goes on the wall.