NEW YORK, NY.- Jordan Huelskamp unveiled Salon, the world’s first decentralized art fund, bringing together a community of collectors, artists, investors and art professionals to explore new ways of financing and managing an art collection. Using blockchain-based community governance, Salon aims to harness the power of the collective to identify, acquire and steward artworks that will hold financial value for its members and cultural significance for future generations. While Salon’s founding members firmly believe in art for art’s sake, the organization also embraces art as an asset class and aims to offer an innovative solution to some of the art world’s myriad investment barriers.

Structured as a decentralized autonomous organization wrapped in a legal entity, Salon is an Internet-native community with no central leadership, and relies on member participation within its web app to facilitate acquisition decisions. Salon’s investing capabilities were developed in recognition of the opacity of the art investment market. Despite representing a $65+ billion annual market, fine art is notoriously inaccessible and remains an unattainable asset class for most individuals. Salon’s founding members believe that art market exclusivity has far-reaching ramifications, with power players wielding undue influence on who gets to participate in the market. Salon aims to challenge this status quo by pooling members' knowledge, utilizing the hive mind to experience unparalleled market insight and make savvy investment decisions. Salon is further propped up by members’ global networks of gallery and artist relationships—with Salon, members can freely leverage their access for mutual benefit, dismantling systems of exclusion that ultimately hinder the art market.

Unlike fractional ownership models, Salon members share a stake in the upside of all artworks in Salon’s collection, offering an attractive solution to diversifying an art portfolio. In return, members participate in communal governance to shape the direction of Salon’s collection. Using an app to democratically cast votes, members participate in all aspects of growing Salon’s collection. By applying blockchain technology in a novel setting, Salon has the opportunity to build the world’s largest shared art collection.

Salon’s earliest members are bold collectors who reject trends in contemporary art collecting, instead cutting through the noise to identify artists who will stand the test of time. Among Salon’s first acquisitions is a large-scale abstract painting by the rising Los Angeles-based Canadian artist Hanna Hur, whose meticulous, repetition-based works evoke the divine while paying homage to Korean Minimalism.

“Decentralized organizations are redefining the nature of collaboration and profit-sharing for groups of individuals organizing to advance common investment goals. With Salon, we’re leveraging principles revolutionized by web 3—communal ownership, shared governance, and on-chain transparency—to build a distinguished collection of contemporary art.” -Jordan Huelskamp, Founder of Salon