Part of Decential Media’s celebration and recognition of Women’s History month

---

For many, understanding blockchain and web3 continues to remain an enigma. Buzz words and talking points often add more confusion than they distill, further fueling and propagating barriers to entry of the space.

Fortunately, Fanny Lakoubay, founder of LAL ART Advisory, is here to knock those barriers down.

Through her company LAL ART Advisory, Lakoubay supports institutional, corporate, and private clients who want to enter or better navigate the blockchain space.

“Depending on where we are in a bull or bear market, I’ll have more artists, collectors, museums or web3 DAOs that I’ll advise,” Lakoubay said to me during a recent interview.

Prior to LAL ART, Lakoubay spent eight years at Artnet, where she learned how to work with developer teams, tech and marketing. She later moved to Christie's when a collection management start-up she was working for was acquired by the company, and ended up leaving in 2018 to start working in crypto.

“If blockchain seems complicated to explain now, it was even worse in 2018,” Lakoubay said. “I had a friend at the time who was trying to convince artists to experiment with the blockchain—through the company Snark.art—and my job was to work with artists and explain to them enough about the concept of the blockchain in order for them to conceptualize it.”

According to Lakoubay, it was an extremely difficult task, but one that worked for a few projects.

“In New York in 2018, that’s when you had the Rare Art Festival, SuperRare was starting, and all of these fun people were becoming friends around blockchain,” Lakoubay said. “We organized a second Rare Art Festival where there were other marketplaces, and I worked for a few of them before realizing I wanted to advise artists and collectors in the digital art space.”

Lakoubay’s background in art and tech helped her be well positioned to stay in the highly technical scene of learning about blockchain and laid the groundwork for her to educate others about the space.

Connecting directly with artists

“Working in the secondary art market, you’re never in direct contact with the artists,” Lakoubay said. “Nobody wanted to work with the artists directly because it was ‘difficult’ and they provided all of these reasons. But there’s no industry without the artists and their products, so it was a breath of fresh air when I was able to become involved in artist management for marketplaces.”

Becoming friends with the artists and connecting with them directly helped Lakoubay realize how much she enjoyed this element of the work and helped her pivot to the advising sphere.

“Artists were excited by the new technology,” she said. “When you present a new technology to an artist, suddenly you have all of these possibilities offered to them. These were non-traditional artists like stay-at-home moms, researchers, devs—all of these different people who were bringing more depth to the space and who were equally excited to learn it.”

After the 2021 Beeple sale, which helped introduce nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and ways to make money in digital art to a wider audience, Lakoubay was contacted by traditional artists who wanted to create NFTs or sell their works as NFTs. She worked with everyone from artists, architects, painters, and street artists—all who wanted to make the move into the digital space.

De-hyping the NFT craze

“The first thing I told them—and still tell people—is you don’t just make an NFT and that’s it,” she said. “That may have worked for a few months in 2021, but it’s hard work to make a successful career when you’re literally starting from scratch. There was a lot of ‘de-hyping’ of what people had read online.”

There are some basic elements from the traditional art world that do work – like having a web site – and can be applied to digital space. 

“We’ve all seen the Linktrees—which are great for when you’re starting—but when an artist wants to tell their story and explain what their work is about, giving links to people to buy something they’re unfamiliar with and don’t understand has no meaning,” Lakoubay said.

While Lakoubay is not a gallery owner and doesn’t represent artists, the services she provides through LAL ART as an advisor could be looked at like the services provided by a financial advisor or any other paid consultant who helps aid one part of an artist’s business.

“To me, the work is much more upstream from the selling,” Lakoubay said. “If you haven’t sold something, there are probably some things you haven’t done beforehand and you’ll need to fix. With some of the successful artists we’ve worked with—like Operator—we’ll do things like a monthly call where we’ll review upcoming projects, strategy, positioning and pricing. We’ve done that with Operator, the three founders of theVERSEverse—which is poetry on the blockchain—Rhea Myers, and many residencies as well.”

An artist or museum might then contact Lakoubay for help breaking into the web3 space or for help with an existing web3 project and how best to move it forward in the digital landscape.

“What’s interesting for many crypto artists is that it’s really hard for them to get representation,” Lakoubay said. “We helped set up meetings for them with publicists, social media managers and strategists, and helped form teams around the artist or small studios.”

One initiative that LAL ART is deeply involved in is We Are Museums—the collection of practitioners who research environmental, social, and technological innovations—that’s now helping cultural institutions like Palais de Tokyo and Van Gogh Museum learn web3.

“I’ve known Diane Drubay—founder of We Are Museums—for many years, and she really comes from the museum world,” Lakoubay said. “She got in touch with me because she wanted to start an innovation lab for museums about web3.”

Read more: Diane Drubay and WAC Are Using Web3 to Reckon with Patronage, Power and the Future of Museums

Three years ago, We Are Museums and Tezos created WAC Labs—web3 for arts and culture—with the goal of making museums literate in blockchain and helping them understand what they can do with the technology.

“Things like exhibiting blockchain art, using live minting for audience engagement, and using blockchain for preservation or interpretation,” Lakoubay said. “We’re now in our third year, and while I still work with a few private collectors, working with museums takes up a lot of my time.”

This year, 20 museums are taking part in a six-week intensive web3 course with trainers, mentors, short videos about the basics of blockchain, use cases for museums, the metaverse, DAOs, ethics and social impact. The museums can then choose to build a project with the web3 tech integrations—anything from a digital souvenir to creating digital wallets for guests.

“It’s really fun to see museums going from ‘I would never use blockchain for my museum’ to ‘Hmm, this is interesting,’” Lakoubay said. “Once they understand it, they get excited by the possibilities.”

In this way, LAL ART and Lakoubay’s work is web3 media literacy.

“It’s teaching and is absolutely literacy,” Lakoubay said. “Even when advising collectors, it’s the same. It’s also transliteracy.”

Because, while efforts have been made to simplify the technology, web3 tech remains complex.

“It’s not something where you have ready-to-use tools that anyone can use,” Lakoubay said. “You’re still working with very technical tooling. Something you might think should be simple—such as live minting an NFT or launching an activation—is not easy, and sometimes, there’s just that missing piece of information.”