“Jason graduated from simply writing about NFTs to being one of the first collectors on SuperRare.”
In 2017, Jason Bailey (a.k.a Artnome) wrote an article called ‘The Blockchain Art Market is here.’ The influential paper became the voice of the time and resulted in the onboarding of most of the artists in the NFT space for the next three years. The marketplace was effectively constructed based on the article, and Jason inadvertently became the scribe for a whole NFT generation.
Feeling like an outsider, born into a family of engineers, Jason has the heart and soul of a true artist. After getting his first art degree, he struggled to make a living in the traditional art world. His career even included a stint as an accident reconstruction artist, rendering people and objects devoid of any emotion. He began to die inside.
“I was lucky for a kid with an art degree to have real work and be able to pay for my family, house and stuff like that,” he recalls. “But, I always wanted to do art – and do art on my terms.”
He went back to studying nights after mortgaging his house for tuition to nourish his creative side and earned a second art degree in digital art history from the Dynamic Media Institute at Mass Art, but he was still looking for real direction. For a while, he was distracted by sport and built a website called Hoopism, a history of basketball’s top slam dunks with analytics and links to footage. It set YouTube on fire and started a conversation between Jason and a major sports company, which ultimately went nowhere.
From a sports-related database, Jason reverted to art – ‘his religion’ – and set about creating a definitive database of 20th century art and artists. This time, it was the art world that was set on fire and Jason began to get traction with the major art auction houses. It was during his interaction with them that he saw the emergence of digital art.
His writing started to include subjects such as blockchain and AI in copy that the average person could understand and that made the traditional art world comfortable.
Jason graduated from simply writing about NFTs to being one of the first collectors on SuperRare. He has bought and sold some of NFTs’ most iconic pieces since then and is now working on his own creativity.
He may not have made it as an artist in the ‘real world’ and may describe himself as a perennial outsider, but Artnome is definitely an NFT insider and one of its most influential players.