Who Chooses the Artwork? Curatorial Agency and Distributed Intent in Botto

RESUMO

Botto is often described as a decentralized autonomous artist, but its authorship cannot be located in image generation alone. This paper examines Botto as an agentic curatorial system in which generation, ranking, voting, feedback, and minting form a recursive loop. Drawing on Botto's documentation and prior accounts of the project, we argue that agency in Botto is distributed but asymmetrical: community participants influence artistic direction through voting and governance, while Botto's internal models structure which images become visible, selectable, and recognizable as works. The case shows that, for AI art systems, explainability should include not only model behavior but also the curatorial procedures through which outputs acquire artistic status.