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Tam Gryn is all about developing mind-blowing projects at the intersection between art and other industries. Over the past years, the Venezuelan curator has been finding solutions to the million-dollar question: how to find new financial models for artists to survive and culture to keep evolving? In this compelling conversation with Pauline Foessel, she also explains how and why she came to write the bible “How to Create and Sell NFTs, A Guide For All Artists”, published in 2022.
Most guides to NFTs teach you the mechanics. Tam Gryn's does something more ambitious: it tries to rebuild the financial logic of the art world from the ground up. The Venezuelan curator recognised early that digital art wasn't just a new medium - it was an opportunity to rethink how artists survive, how culture gets funded, and what collecting might mean in a world where scarcity can be programmed.
Tam Gryn is a Venezuelan curator whose practice focuses on the intersection of art, technology, and new economic models. She has spent years developing projects that ask a difficult but practical question: how do artists make a living without compromising their work? In 2022, she published "How to Create and Sell NFTs: A Guide For All Artists" - one of the most substantive how-to texts to emerge from the NFT moment, grounded in curatorial thinking rather than speculation.
The book is a starting point, not the subject. What Tam Gryn is actually working on is the deeper question of financial models - how culture gets sustained when the existing systems (gallery commissions, public funding, institutional support) are failing or inaccessible to most artists. NFTs offered one set of tools. This conversation explores which of those tools remain useful after the hype, and what a genuinely sustainable financial model for digital art practice looks like. It's an honest account of the gap between what was promised and what was delivered - and what comes next.
New financial models for artists
The traditional gallery model extracts a large percentage from artists who often have little leverage. Gryn has spent her career looking for alternatives - and the NFT space, for all its problems, opened a genuine conversation about royalties, direct sales, and ownership that the traditional market had avoided.
The NFT guide as cultural infrastructure
Writing an accessible guide to NFTs was a curatorial act. Gryn was trying to lower the barrier to participation for artists who were being left out of a conversation about tools that could benefit them. The book is infrastructure for a more equitable ecosystem.
Digital art as a cultural movement
Gryn frames digital art not just as a category of objects but as a movement - with its own history, communities, and values. Understanding it as a movement rather than a market changes how you evaluate what's happening and what matters.
The curator as problem-solver
Across her work, Gryn treats curation as applied problem-solving: identifying the gap between what artists need and what systems provide, then designing something to fill it. That approach produces practical cultural work rather than theoretical gestures.
The financial health of the artists you collect is not separate from the quality of what you collect. Gryn's thinking about sustainable models, fair compensation, and the long-term infrastructure of digital art culture is directly relevant to anyone building a serious collection. Understanding the economics of artists' survival helps you make better decisions about who to support and how.
Unlocked is the podcast by 100 collectors - the global network for digital art collectors. Each episode, we speak with artists, curators, collectors, and builders shaping the digital art world. No market speculation. No hype. Just honest, substantive conversations about art, practice, and what it means to collect today. New episodes release throughout the year. Find Unlocked on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 100 collectors is a membership network. [Explore membership →]
