localhost
An experimental gallery in the San Francisco Bay Area, in residence at Gray Area's Cultural Incubator
Most galleries operate inside the same arrangement: the work is sold as exclusive property, money moves on the initial sale, and any upside on resale typically stays with whoever holds the object - not with the artist or the communities behind the work.
An artist creates a work that flows through a gallery — or directly — to a collector, who becomes the exclusive owner.
PCOArt names three roles. The artist makes the work. The creator circle - people, communities, and entities integral to the work's making - share authorship. The stewards hold the work, and their holding is a commitment to the creator circle, not only to the work.
The artist and creator circle define a stewardship license that sets the terms: who stewards the work, for how long, what honorarium flows back to the creator circle each cycle, and under what conditions stewardship passes to someone new. Those terms are negotiated per work and context.
An artist and creator circle define a stewardship license for the artwork, setting the terms a steward agrees to uphold.
When a gallery works with PCOArt, it may sit inside the creator circle and/or be a steward - but what is licensed, and at what scale, remains an open question in this research. A stewardship license might attach to an individual work, to several works, or to an exhibition as a whole; some pieces in a show might be offered under PCOArt terms while others are sold in the conventional way. The diagrams below sketch one path localhost is exploring: the gallery helps define license terms, acts as first steward for an exhibition, and may then extend stewardship to additional supporters.
The gallery collaborates with the artist and creator circle to define a stewardship license for the exhibition.
What the diagrams show is who holds the work, who belongs to the creator circle, and how value circulates over time - relationships that are also a legal and financial arrangement. This happens to be exactly what smart contracts are designed for, which is why the original PCOArt proposal incorporates a blockchain layer. localhost intends to as well, and to publish a set of smart contracts as part of the open-source toolkit.
To steward a work, adapt the model for your own context, or collaborate on the toolkit — get in touch.