NFTs and art museums: the latest success stories
Bull market is back — and so are NFT exhibitions and auctions at premiere venues. Musee d’Orsay, Art Dubai, New York MoMA — all of them have recently collaborated with NFT artists. Let’s look at these initiatives and evaluate if they are a sign of an upcoming NFT rally.
Art Dubai Digital embraces NFTs
Since 2007, Art Dubai has been the showcase for works by artists from the Middle East and worldwide. Bringing together leading contemporary artists and emerging talent. It’s one of the biggest art fairs in the world — and the only one to have a regular Art Dubai Digital section, which features NFTs, AI, AR, VR, etc.
The 2024 edition is taking place on March 1–3 and features, among other digital collectives, TAEX — a platform that works with established, critically acclaimed digital artists. At Art Dubai, its presenting a set of 12 interactive websites minted as NFTs, by the Greek artist Angelo Plessas. Every NFT features a ZIP archive with an adaptive HTML page, with prices starting at 0.5 ETH.
Another participant is Morrow Collective — an “NFT fine art curatorship” that represents over 40 NFT artists from the US, France, Argentina, South Korea, etc. All the works will be made available for sale, though the exact price of each NFT has yet to be determined.
Musée d’Orsay: 2,000 breaths to make 5 NFTs
Musée d’Orsay is known for the world’s best collection of Impressionist paintings, but it’s also ready for experimentation: its first-ever on-chain exhibition went live on February 29. It consists of just 5 NFTs, collectively titled “The Convergence of Breath”. They are minted on Tezos — one of the non-EVM blockchains that XP.NETWORK supports, by the way.
The most interesting part, however, is how those 5 NFTs were designed. First, the artists Agoria and Johan Lescure created a steel sculpture that is now exhibited at the museum. Not just any sculpture, though: depending on how the light falls, sometimes a QR code appears on the floor in its shadow. Scanning the code, you can access a platform for minting free NFTs inspired by the Impressionist masterpieces in the museum’s collection. To mint an NFT, though, you also have to… blow into the phone! The sound of your breath is registered and sent to the artists.
Agoria and Lescure collected all those recorded breaths — over 2,000 of them — and merged them into five sound pieces — the NFTs. They were sold on Objct.One (a curated NFT marketplace on Tezos) for 3,600 XTZ and up.
New York Museum of Modern Art adds 2 NFTs to its permanent collection
New York MoMA exhibits paintings by Van Gogh and Andy Warhol — and now it owns NFTs, as well. In late 2023, MoMA announced the purchase of two digital collectibles: “Unsupervised” by Refik Anadol and “3FACE” by Ian Cheng.
Refik Anadol is famous for his AI-generated dynamic abstractions. To create “Unsupervised”, he fed almost 140,000 images of works from MoMA’s collection into an AI algorithm. The digital work was then exhibited at the museum on a 24-foot tall screen. Meanwhile, the NFT will now remain in the institution’s collection.
As for 3FACE, it’s an even more innovative collection. There are 4,096 in all, and each NFT adapts to its holder — or rather, their wallet. It starts out as an “energy daemon”, but as it reads the history of your wallet’s public transactions, the daemon begins to change. The holder can choose to update the 3FACE any time to save the changes (gas fees apply).
These three stories show that the real-life art world is still interested in NFTs — at least in real NFT artworks. Perhaps we won’t see monkey PFPs do 100x in the upcoming bull run, but high-quality art and NFTs with real utility will thrive — and that’s definitely a healthier trajectory.
