Some Like it Digital: Meet Me in the Metaverse

About the Event

Why spend time in Second Life, when we are not done with the first one? How many metaverses are there? One or multiple? and if there are multiple how do you know where you might have a date with art, entertainment or destiny if you don’t have a map or clues to where you are supposed to be? Web 3.0 is making waves if not disruptions and capturing imagination of some but not the skeptics (yet). Join us at the Center for Art Law as we dip out toes and cast glance behind the digital scrim to learn about art that imitates life in the space now know as the metaverse. What rules govern in the metaverse and who if not artists are the kings that govern the new realms? Join our speakers as we explore this new and tumultuous space.

About Our Speakers

Massimo Sterpi is partner and Head of the IP and Art Law departments of Rome of Gianni Origoni Grippo Cappelli & Partners. He has over 25 year of experience in all types of IP litigation and in complex IP transactions and leads a large group of IP specialist, with a special focus on new technologies. A passionate art collector, he has gained an internationally recognized experience in art law. In this field, he addressed a wide range of topics including authenticity, recovery of stolen or looted artworks, commissions of artworks, management of artists’ estates, licenses and merchandising, unauthorized reproduction, sales and exports of works of art, declaration of works of art as national treasures. Over the last years, he has been focusing on the impact of disrupting technologies on the creation, distribution and trade of art, and lately of the impact of NFTs and Metaverse on the art market.

He is the author or has edited numerous publications on intellectual property, art law and art tech, including the Art Collecting Legal Handbook (published by Thomson Reuters), which cover the laws on art in 30 different jurisdictions. He often speaks in art law subjects in international conferences. Massimo is on the WIPO Lists of Mediators and Referees in matters of IP and Art and Cultural Heritage. He has been Chairman of the IBA Committee for Art, Cultural Heritage and Cultural Institutions and is the current President of the UIA’s Art Law Committee.

He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and sits on the Board of Directors of the US Friends of the MAXXI Foundation.

Jesse Damiani is Founder and Director of Postreality Labs, a new media art and emerging technology advisory and curatorial studio. He is Curator & Director of Simulation Literacies at Nxt Museum, a Research Affiliate at Institute for the Future, and an Affiliate of the metaLAB at Harvard. Recent exhibitions he curated include Synthetic Wilderness at Honor Fraser Gallery, Sea Change at Vellum LA, and PROOF OF ART at Francisco Carolinum Linz, the first museum retrospective on the history of NFTs.

He formerly served as Director of Emerging Technology & Insight at Southern New Hampshire University, where he led the Future of Work initiative. He was listed as a top global VR influencer in 2017 by Onalytica and in 2021 by HTC Vive, was interviewed as an expert source in the AP guide for immersive journalism, and runs “Immersive Writers & Storytellers” and “Blockchain XR.”

He has served as a mentor in the YouTube VR Creator Lab and worked with Google in their initiative to develop educational content for the VR/AR industry as Curriculum Writer/Editor and on-camera instructor on their “VR and 360 Video Production” and “Introduction to Augmented Reality and ARCore” courses.