CRITQ~Art Criticism NFT Marketplace

An NFT Art marketplace centred around crowdsourced art criticism rather than exclusive juried submissions or nonsensical bidding 'wars'

Travis Cook: Front-end dev, Art Gallery co-founder

Edno Mesquita: Fullstack, Blockchain Dev

David Fatimehin: Business, Gallery co-founder

Project Description:
Name: "CRITIQ", or "CRITQ" -which do you like better?
This project is the evolution of a previous concept originally pitched at the U of M GameChanger Pitch Contest under the working title "FRAME(D)" where it won 3rd place. The concept has since pivoted substantially and adapted for application in the NFT space, but the core value proposition remains intact. The original whitepaper can be found here: https://www.notion.so/taubypi/FRAME-D-A-Social-Art-Media-Platform-3fa2add5621341ccb80aec0174c19581

Problem:

This quote from Guy @CoinBureau sums up the problem well:
"Unless you're buying an NFT from a well-known artist like Beeple it can be really hard to tell whether the NFT you are ogling has any real value. In theory you can check this by reviewing the sell history of that NFT to see if there's any demand for it; however many sellers are minting NFTS and then buying them from themselves using other Ethereum wallets that they own. This creates an artificial sell history and gives you the impression that the NFT you're interested in has some market value. It's basically a 'solo' version of the wash trading you see on a lot of sketchy cryptocurrency exchanges. There are also a lot of sellers on NFT marketplaces pretending to be museums and art galleries. Sometimes they're even marked as a 'verified seller' because they link to a dummy account on twitter. These fake museums and art galleries sell high quality images of semi-famous artworks they found on google as NFTS for a pretty profit. Besides the risks I just pointed out, there are a few others to keep in mind; the NFT market is clearly in a bubble and unlike the crypto market there's going to be little to no support on the way down. This is mainly because the NFT market isn't liquid and there's also no definitive way to tell what the fair value of any NFT is" -Coin Bureau; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFEVUIK3bFk

Solution:

CRITIQ can provide a much needed service helping buyers assess the 'fair value' of NFTs and prevent scammers from 'wash selling', selling off art owned by others, or selling over-priced art to 'naive' or uninformed buyers (who are currently flooding the market). The crowdsourced criticism and evaluation of NFT art on exhibit and/or for sale (combined/augmented with AI/ML) can pick out forgeries, expose scam artists, & establish fair valuations through the 'wisdom of the crowd'.

Product:

CRITIQ is a decentralized marketplace which aims to establish a destination for artists to develop critical acclaim, offering equal opportunity for promotion and maximizing merit-based 'reward'. The platform represents a reaction to the major disconnect of the price of art to its actual value (NFT and traditional), and will encourage valuation on more relevant and equitable criteria (ie. aesthetics, beauty, form, meaning, concept/narrative, cultural significance, history, skill, work, etc.).

Features (including future versions/development):

• An NFT Art marketplace based on art criticism & informed valuation of art works.
• Critics can write reviews/critiques of art works and earn tokens for views and/or ratings of critique (star rating or applause)
• Integrated crowdsourced semantic evaluation/analysis, & categorization of art works
• Option to submit art work(s) to initial 'criticism' phase before opening to bidding, for buyers & sellers to get a more informed evaluation of the work via crowdsourcing
• The marketplace is divided into 2 sections: one for exhibition style sales (criticism & bidding), and the other for more varied digital assets and collectibles and more 'gamified' type bidding
• 'Gamified' bidding: Users can (optionally) submit/post art and/or short form content to 'compete' or get evaluated against others (competitive crowdsourced valuation)
• Posts/Art items are displayed in 3 boxes per screen, and viewers pick favourite(s) and/or rate each (by various criteria)
• Alternative "Grid Bidding"; gamified contests & bidding where buyers rank and bid on items presented in a grid layout with live updates on ranking, bidding, projections (and links to criticisms, info, etc.)
• Viewers 'bet' or speculate on winners, or use for evaluation/analysis for more informed projected value(s) when bidding
• Aggregated news, info, & events from around the web related to artist(s) and/or art works
• Option to compete in contests without stats (so viewers aren't influenced by who's trending, etc.)
• or compete anonymously (identity/name of artist isn't revealed; only the work is seen) so viewers aren't influenced by popularity/notoriety/reputation of artist, etc. and can only judge the work on its own merit
• Option for private criticisms, evaluations, contests, and 'Critiq' groups
• Modularized Criticism API for possible sales and/or implementation into existing marketplaces.
• Crowdsourced curation & exhibition of art works (including criticisms)
• Fractional Ownership investment & patronage opportunities
• Digital NFT art, NFT 'Signatures' & 'Proof of Authenticity' for traditional art
• AI/ML analysis of submitted NFT images for AI 'augmented' evaluations, and comparisons against public databases of art by known artists to inform buyers via aggregated matches and meta data of images, artists, and sellers
• Semantic data compilation for crowdsourced criticisms, and metrics/rubrics for analysis & evaluation algorithms, etc.

Market:

• Art criticism is an essential component of the art industry as evidenced (most notably) by the fact that the skill, or 'art' of criticism itself makes up 60% of the content of a typical fine arts degree. In the traditional art world, galleries and auctions rely on the skills of knowledgeable critics, curators, and appraisers to assess the value of works and to inform the public and buyers of the context, history, unique characteristics, and other crucially important aspects of the works, especially with regards to its valuation.
• This element of criticism is noticeably missing in the NFT marketplaces so far, and could lend the industry much needed credibility and attention from the greater art community/industry. The aim of CRITIQ is to infuse the NFT space with a sharper focus on the value of the art and to engage the surrounding community, while still catering to the interests and growing culture of the NFT digital assets & collectibles community. Thus the marketplace will be divided into exhibition type sales, and 'gamified' type sales; the former to appeal to artists and art buyers, and the latter to the collectible market (although both can benefit from the added focus on criticism).

Target Customers/Users:

• We intend to leverage our collective experience as previous co-founders of a local Art Gallery & FRAME Arts Warehouse; a 40,000 sf warehouse retrofit with over 40 artist's studios and residences. We have built up a community of artists both locally, and internationally that we hope to onboard to the new digital platform (and who shown an expressed interest in doing so).
• Our primary target market is emerging artists, digital artists, NFT (& traditional) art collectors, critics/writers/reviewers and art journalists.
• A secondary target market may be other NFT marketplaces as we intend to modularize our criticism technology, making it potentially available for implementation into other existing marketplaces.

Competition/Comparables:

• Superrare.co
• Rarible.com
• SIGN Art (sign-art.app)
• OpenSea

SuperRare has done a good job of creating an aesthetically appealing and well designed environment as well as decent to high quality (and demand) via a juried submission process. The downside of this is that it is exclusive and not very decentralized or democratic.
Our approach is to offer some of the better aspects of SuperRare, like well-designed exhibit environments and aesthetics, and to try and encourage high quality content through the process of crowdsourced art criticism. However, we will remove the barrier of exclusivity and make it open to all (equal opportunity for all artists).
Rarible has introduced a very popular highly decentralized model that gives ownership to all members, opportunities for 'dividends' and profit sharing, and recurring compensations to original artists as the work gets turned over/resold to new buyers, but has had trouble managing abuses of the system and hosts a bit of a mishmash of content (not clearly targeted).
We like the initial core approach (especially the recurring compensation of original artists) and intend to employ a similar (but improved) model, but instead of the 'flea market' environment, we intend to divide the user experience into two distinct environments, and create a well designed art gallery or digital exhibition spaces, and a 'gamified' collectible market.

Product Roadmap:

• We will develop a proof of concept MVP, and our intention will be to focus on the marketplace environment and specifically the criticism and comparison contests components (functionality and design). We intend to ultimately implement a Domain Driven Design and build a dedicated API layer for these services, (the topology is TBD) however the MVP will be a light, flexible prototype that can adapt quickly to knew knowledge and iterate quickly and efficiently, as it is nearly impossible to get service boundaries (and scopes) right from the outset.
• We will likely wait for (decent) tooling/scaffolding to be available for building most of the NFT infrastructure (anticipating development from projects like NFT-DAO), although we will preliminarily test some smart contract functionality with available tools. The MVP in Phase 1 will include only a limited and basic set of features to test & validate concept, as well as UI/front-end, product & architecture design.
• We will be applying for additional funding for Phase 2, although we hope to at least partially build out some of the items in Phase 1.
• We will also possibly be accessing alternative funding/financing to supplement the total project budget.

Phase 1: (First 3 months)

1. Consult/hire experienced blockchain developer
   *Architecture Design, prioritizing modularity:*
2. Consider implementation of thick client app/UI & lightweight 'message brokering' system, REST API or RPC TBD
3. For MVP; consider Glow, Reach (a 'Blockchain Agnostic' framework https://reach.sh/ ), or KEVM/Solidity for quick implementation allowing focus on differentiating features/services of app & API layer(s) depending on consult.
4. *Development of Initial MVP:*
5. Build (Rough) Design System (UI/X, Components library, Tokens, APIs)
6. Database, Back-end design (consider graphQL if feasible (tooling available))
7. Marketplace design (Wireframes, prototyping, UI/UX, front-end dev)
8. Crowdsourced Criticism, Ranking & Reviews (Modular Functionality)
9. Basic User profiles/submission

Phase 2: (Months 3 - 6) (some of these may be partially developed in Phase 1, depending on time/resources available before next funding round)

1. Smart Contracts (Plutus, Glow, or Reach)
2. Artist Profiles, Spaces, & Submission/exhibition
3. Bidding (limited features, testing basic transactions)
4. Gamification Contests (skeleton version)

Phase 3: (TBD)

• Build new platform (Beta) with NFT-DAO infrastructure & tooling, new version features

Budget:

• 100 Design hrs (UI/UX/Graphic Design, Prototyping)
• 200 Developer hrs
• 33 Miscellaneous/Administration
• 333 hrs @ 60/hr = $20000

KPIs:

1. Onboard 10-20 artists to build profiles and submit art work
2. Onboard 20-50 beta users to test crowdsourced criticism features
3. Survey artists and fine-tune criticism features (& bidding) to achieve appropriate/desirable NFT art 'valuations' (70% approval)

Team/Experience:

• Travis Cook: Experience as an artist, with a Fine Arts Degree, and was a cofounder (with David Fatimehin & Ali Tataryn) of an art gallery and warehouse building with 42 art studios. (Fine Arts BFA, Computer Science Degree, Artist/Curator, Designer, Developer, SMM, Philosophy/Criticism) Roles: Ideation/validation, product design/prototyping, front-end dev, content marketing, business, team/production agile management
• Edno Mesquita: (Computer Science BS, Masters Student, PHP/Laravel/Vue.js, Angular, React, Full Stack Developer, Blockchain, Solidity, Functional Programming) Roles: Programming, development, db design, front-end integration
• David Fatimehin: (Business, Project Development Diploma, Marketing) Co-founder of Frame Arts Warehouse. Roles: Project management, business, sales/marketing, finances/accounting, research, funding/financing acquisition
• We will also be looking to hire another blockchain developer

References/Resources:

Bailey, J. (2020). Can Machine Learning Predict the Price of Art at Auction? — Artnome. Retrieved 6 March 2021, from https://www.artnome.com/news/2020/5/5/can-machine-learning-predict-the-price-of-art-at-auction

Whitaker, A., & Kraeussl, R. (2018). Democratizing Art Markets: Fractional Ownership and the Securitization of Art. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.3100389, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3100389