Jason Bailey (Artnome)

Jason Bailey writes and works under the name Artnome. He spent two decades in senior leadership roles at technology startups before setting up his own tech marketing and consulting practice, and he built Artnome.com as a place to explore art through data, assembling databases of artist catalogues so that art history could be queried rather than only read. He calls himself the chief art nerd. From 2017 he argued in public that blockchains would change how digital artists sell and keep their work, and in April 2018 he became the first collector on SuperRare when he bought Robbie Barrat's AI Generated Nude Portrait number 1, the first artwork tokenised on the platform. He then partnered with SuperRare to bring NFTs to the traditional art world at the Christie's Art and Tech Summit in London that summer. In March 2021 he founded ClubNFT, where he is chief executive, after research showed that a large share of NFT art was not stored on chain and could disappear if a single server went away. ClubNFT gave collectors a free way to back up their files. He also started the GreenNFTs initiative and launched Right Click Save, a magazine of serious criticism about art on the blockchain. He has written for Art in America and the Harvard Data Science Review and has lectured at Christie's and Sotheby's.

Bailey collects early crypto art and generative work, with a focus on pieces that mark a moment in the medium's history rather than on market names. His best known holdings come from Robbie Barrat's GAN period, the AI nudes and landscapes trained on scans of nineteenth century painting. Alongside collecting he writes criticism, builds art databases, and runs preservation tooling at ClubNFT.

• Artnome.com, exploring art through data
• First collector on SuperRare, April 2018
• Founder and CEO of ClubNFT, free NFT backup
• Founder of Right Click Save magazine
• GreenNFTs initiative
• Exhibition statement for Frank Stella: Geometries

On the show