I want one of these for software developers. Edit: and no, YC doesn't count. Sorry.
It's not exactly the same, but there is the Recurse Center (formerly Hacker School).
1) What would be the equivalent of a "painting"? (esp in the age of copypasta from stack overflow)
2) Who would the "owners"/"patrons"/"tourists" be?
3) How could this work internationally?
Some thoughts:
1) I don't really know. At first I was thinking "create a program that automates some task you could do with your computer" so it could allow for the mundane and complex, but the former is probably found as stack overflow questions. I know some forums use submit a pull request on git repo with a mod as a way in.
2) I was thinking that software engineers in relatively high paying gigs could be the "owners" who would in a sense subsidize maybe a nice apts somewhere in SE asia/ eastern europe where they themselves could vacation or hang out, or other engineers could live and pay "rent" (as well as all the necessary hacking of the legal/visa system) either in currency or maybe gigs with/for other engineers, companies and freelancer clients would be "patrons", or "tourists"
3) You can pretty much deploy code from anywhere in the world, but navigating the bureaucracy/exploitation (mostly looking at wage discrepancies) of traveling and working anywhere in the world isn't quite here yet. Something that feels transient like airbnb, but robust and minimizes the incentives to pollute "the commons".
But also good to keep in mind that such a system probably won't be free of what ails us all as humans.
The recurse center mentioned by the other poster seems like something in that direction, but seems very focused on a specific location for bringing people, where I think something like this could benefit from being able to be anywhere with subset of such people involved able to go from place to place or fixate as they see fit/things arise.
Your ideas for ownership sound good, but another option would be a co-op. There's obviously all sorts of difficulties with this, but it seems possible. Also, there doesn't have to be just one. It can be customized per location, per group of founders, or per anything-else. We can let the variants fight it out in the best Darwinian fashion.
In your #3, are you talking about having the whole group roving around the world? At that point it seems like you're taking about something a lot more ambitious than I am.
With #3, I was thinking that maybe some people would want to be roving around the world, to different hubs that are all connected. So instead of fighting it out with other similar yet competing(?) ideas, each hub would reinforce another with given resources available to people who are passing through or at a hub at a given time, yet still have the freedom to do their own thing. Also, maybe something like this could avoid being too reliant on a given location (like NYC for the artists, or possibly what SF has become today) over time if a locations economics turn out to not be so in favor compared to other locations, as well as allowing for flexibility with others who cant/wont move to a single location/country.