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Gagosian Quarterly

Fall 2022 Issue

Screen time:how museums are thinking about nfts

Ashley Overbeek reports on the different ways in which museums across the world are harnessing the power of crypto art in their exhibitions, collections, and community building.

Refik Anadol, Machine Hallucinations–Renaissance Dreams, 2022, AI data sculpture, video loop LED wall, 29 feet 6 ⅜ inches × 19 feet 8 ¼ inches (900 × 600 cm), installation view, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy. Photo: © Ela Bialkowska OKNO studio

Refik Anadol, Machine Hallucinations–Renaissance Dreams, 2022, AI data sculpture, video loop LED wall, 29 feet 6 ⅜ inches × 19 feet 8 ¼ inches (900 × 600 cm), installation view, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy. Photo: © Ela Bialkowska OKNO studio

Ashley Overbeek

Ashley Overbeek is the director of strategic initiatives at Gagosian, where she has the pleasure of working with artists on Web3 and digital projects. Overbeek is also an advisory-board member of the Art and Antiquities Blockchain Consortium, a 501c3 nonprofit, and a guest speaker on the subject of art and blockchain technology at Stanford and Columbia University.

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It’s an unseasonably warm spring day in Florence, 83°F, when I approach the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. As I enter the open-air atrium I’m greeted by a colossal site-specific work by Refik Anadol, a Turkish-American artist known for using data-driven algorithms to create dynamic abstract visualizations. This piece is a non-fungible token (NFT) displayed using a nearly thirty-foot-tall LED wall that stands squarely in the atrium. Rich hues ebb and flow mercurially in impossible gravity, enclosed by the dimensions of the screen. Titled Machine Hallucinations—Renaissance Dreams, the NFT is sentineled at the entryway to the Palazzo Strozzi’s latest exhibition, Let’s Get Digital!: NFT e nuove realtà dell’arte digitale/NFTs and Innovation in Digital Art.

The Palazzo has two exhibitions open today. In the Strozzina, the undercroft of the Renaissance palace, Let’s Get Digital! features an array of digital artworks minted on a blockchain. Upstairs from the atrium, Donatello: Il Rinascimento/The Renaissance presents a collection of works by the fifteenth-century sculptor apposed to a subset of notable contemporaries (Brunelleschi, Raphael, and Michelangelo, to name a few). In discussing these synchronous shows, Arturo Galansino, cocurator of Let’s Get Digital! and director general of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, mentions to me that the museum is facilitating “an incredible and even a bit paradoxical dialogue between past and present” through concurrent exhibitions focused on historical and ongoing revolutions of thought. “The perfect place to start talking about NFTs,” Galansino continues, “is in a classical institution.”

The Palazzo Strozzi’s perspective represents just one of the myriad approaches that museums are taking as they begin to interact with the ever evolving world of NFTs. An NFT can be thought of as a “digital proof of authenticity” stored cryptographically on a blockchain, which in turn is a distributed digital ledger where transactions are recorded across a peer-to-peer network of computers. A large appeal of the blockchain is the difficulty of falsifying its records, so that users can trust information on-chain without the need to trust a central authority. In contrast to other types of digital content, NFTs are unique tokens and their scarcity and ownership are provable on a blockchain’s distributed ledger. This means that NFTs can offer a largely immutable public provenance for each piece of crypto art (digital art that is minted on a blockchain). Many digital artists and collectors see NFT technology as a revolutionary tool, providing a tokenized proof of ownership for digital art, which by its very nature has the capacity to be infinitely reproduced.

The perfect place to start talking about NFTs is in a classical institution.

Arturo Galansino

Since March 2021, when the sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days for 42,329 Ether ($69.3 million at the time) catapulted NFTs into the public discourse, crypto art has become a mainstay in art-world dialogue. Certainly the number of art organizations entering the NFT space has grown rapidly in the last two years. Yet in many ways the art world continues to grapple with what to think about NFTs and how they fit into the broader art ecosystem. Because of the position of museums as rarified organizations with the ability to cement artists, mediums, and movements into the canon of art history, museums’ interactions with NFTs will have a lasting impact on the ways we view and discuss these digital assets.

Museums such as New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art have been paying attention to the NFT space for nearly a decade, long before Beeple minted his first NFT. Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of digital art at the Whitney, tells me that she has been “closely following the crypto art space since 2014, when Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash presented their proto-NFTs called monegraphs (short for ‘monetized graphics’) at [New York’s] New Museum.” (McCoy and Dash made their presentation as a contribution to 7×7, an annual program of the New Museum’s resident affiliate Rhizome.) The Whitney has done more than just observe the crypto art space; in 2019, it commissioned a work by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy called Public Key/Private Key, a reference to the two cryptographic keys central to blockchain transactions. In one part of this piece, fifty members of the public were selected to receive a digital donor certificate minted as an NFT, which could then be transferred, gifted, or sold as desired. Looking toward the future, Paul continues, “From my personal perspective as a museum curator, NFTs are mostly interesting as a medium that supports generative processes on the blockchain and not as a sales mechanism. The Whitney will keep engaging with the NFT space and explore models that can creatively enhance its programming and community.”

In addition to Public Key/Private Key, the Whitney acquired one of the 2,304 unique “atom” NFTs in Eve Sussman’s 89 Seconds Atomized (2018). Each “atom” contains a square, 20-by-20-pixel, roughly ten-minute-long video fragment of the artist’s original video 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2004). The project’s white paper states, “While each video atom will be a one-of-a-kind, induplicable art piece, we believe that the work—both individually and collectively—becomes truly meaningful, and extraordinary, in the community that it creates. And offering a unique mode of shared ownership will give the artwork a second life, allowing it to be far more accessible to a general audience, as well as evolving the meaning of the piece itself.”

Screen Time: How Museums are Thinking about NFTs

Cory Van Lew working on a painting at the ICA Miami annual gala, 2021. Photo: © Chris Carter

The Whitney is not the only museum acquiring crypto art. This June, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced a special fund for digital-art acquisitions in partnership with blockchain enthusiast Paris Hilton. While the fund focuses on both on- and off-chain art, its first two acquisitions are NFTs: Continuum: Los Angeles (2022), by the Canadian-Korean artist Krista Kim (bequeathed to the museum by Hilton), and The Question (2022), by British artist Shantell Martin (commissioned through the fund).

Other museums have begun building their NFT collections through direct gifts. Last year, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (ICA Miami) announced the acquisition of a CryptoPunks NFT through a promised gift from trustee Eduardo Burillo. Launched in 2017, CryptoPunks was one of the earliest projects to be minted on the Ethereum blockchain, predating even the ERC-721 token standard that codified Ethereum-based NFTs. (There are many other blockchains besides Ethereum on which NFTs can be minted, such as the newer Tezos and Solana, but Ethereum is currently the most popular.) The project comprises algorithmically generated characters called “Punks”; developers LarvaLabs created bespoke software that generated precisely 10,000 24-by-24-pixel Punks sharing a subset of predefined attributes (“Rosy Cheeks,” “Mohawk,” “Cigarette,” etc.). The software was constrained by the parameter that no two Punks should have an identical combination of attributes. ICA’s Cryptopunk #5293, nicknamed “Priscila” is a pixelated depiction of a female with orchid-hued lipstick and ink-black hair. Alex Gartenfeld, ICA Miami’s artistic director, tells me, “ICA Miami’s permanent collection is a platform through which to steward innovation. As one of the first series of fixed-set unique NFTs, LarvaLabs’ CryptoPunks project has pioneered a medium that has been the center of the cultural conversation. The work reflects artists’ efforts to innovatively disseminate their work and engage with developments in technology.”

Screen Time: How Museums are Thinking about NFTs

Krista Kim, Mars House, 2020 (detail), 3D files (NFT), installation view, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Italy. Photo: © Ela Bialkowska OKNO studio

Beyond acquiring Cryptopunk #5293: ICA Miami has also started working directly with crypto artists. For its 2021 annual gala to support its mission and programs, the museum auctioned a series of pairs of NFTs and physical paintings by Cory Van Lew. The artist painted live at the gala; the finished pieces were then minted as NFTs to create a physical-digital twinset. A press release that Gartenfeld shared with me states, “The new work builds on a series of paintings and NFTs featuring pandemic-related motifs by Van Lew, who has been deeply inspired by the ongoing collective experience of the pandemic. In these works, the anonymous figures in hazmat suits, their faces obscured by masks, are uncannily rendered in the artist’s signature washes of warm pinks and blues. Van Lew used live figures in hazmat suits as subject-stencils—directing the figures through the museum space and rendering full-size body prints of their forms with an irreverent process of painterly gesture and chance.” Three NFT/painting pairs were sold and a fourth joined Cryptopunk #5293 in the museum’s permanent collection as a gift from the artist.

While the ICA Miami has begun working with living artists such as Van Lew, other museums, including the Uffizi in Florence and the British Museum in London, have started to explore the possibilities of licensing their historic masterworks as NFTs. This strategy has been controversial: some argue that the approach reduces NFT technology to a mere device for selling souvenirs instead of an opportunity to showcase emerging crypto artists. Others opine that it presents a novel, digital way for art enthusiasts to engage with cherished museum masterpieces while also contributing financially to the maintenance of the physical artworks. Last year, the British Museum announced a partnership to sell digital collectibles based on paintings by Hokusai and J. M. W. Turner. “It’s a new space for [us] and we want to learn, listen to the community, and slowly build and adapt our model over time,” a spokesperson for the museum told me. “The NFT community is passionate and engaged and we recognize they are an important voice amongst our audiences as we consider our next steps. We are keen to start small and build. We see NFTs and especially the underlying technology as a potential long-term, multiyear play and our strategy will evolve over time.”

The Moco Museum, Amsterdam, is moving rather swiftly into the NFT space. This independent museum focusing on modern, contemporary, and street art opened two exhibitions of crypto art, one at their flagship location in Amsterdam’s Museumplein, just a stone’s throw from the Van Gogh Museum, and another at their outpost in Barcelona, in the historic Palacio Cervelló. The exhibitions include work by eminent crypto artists including Andrés Reisinger, Mad Dog Jones, and FEWOCiOUS. So far, Moco reports that visitors to the shows have numbered in the hundreds of thousands (roughly 260,000 visitors to the Amsterdam show from December 2021 to June 2022 and 290,000 to the Barcelona show from October 2021 to June 2022).

[Our] permanent collection is a platform through which to steward innovation.

Alex Gartenfeld

“We’re all about innovation,” says Kim Logchies-Prins, cofounder and curator of Moco. “We have a young audience and the way we run our museum, we can move fast.” If an artist envisions their work ensconced in a blue room, Moco’s agile team will get the walls painted by the following day. Given the museum’s mission of bringing broader and younger audiences to museums (over half of Moco’s visitors are first-time museumgoers), Logchies-Prins states, she plans on dedicating 20 percent of the museum’s exhibition space to showcasing NFTs going forward.

Bringing digital art into the physical world in a novel and engaging way is no small feat, especially given the “black cube” trope of darkened, inky-walled spaces that has become commonplace for showcasing digital art across galleries and museums. “We’re working hard to have the best pixels, the best screens, and to make it as beautiful as possible,” Logchies-Prins says. “We have an exhibit created by [DJ and crypto artist] Don Diablo in our garden, it’s a big physical piece which you can enter and then you can see his NFT inside.” Similarly, Galansino and cocurator Serena Tabacchi worked closely with the artists at the Palazzo Strozzi to create an immersive transmedia experience for Let’s Get Digital!, including adding a partially mirrored floor for artist Krista Kim’s installation. And on Anadol’s outdoor installation, Machine Hallucinations—Renaissance Dreams, Galansino remarks, “Even just technology-wise, it’s a masterpiece. So for us, it was also a great experience to work with these kinds of devices. And Refik was amazing because he created something new for us, thinking about our space, our architecture, and our history.” As I stand before Anadol’s operatic installation in the Palazzo Strozzi, the interplay between art history and neoteric technology is on full display. To create this AI-driven data sculpture, Anadol built a machine-learning algorithm and exposed it to a digital databank of thousands of fourteenth-to-seventeenth-century artworks of the Italian Renaissance. The resulting piece offers the algorithm’s “hallucinatory” interpretation of the collective set of classical paintings: a glimpse of a machine’s fever dream imbued with the pigments, shades, and tones of august Italian masters. Looking up at the towering artwork, I am reminded of something Galansino says: “The NFT space has unlimited potential in terms of art experience. . . . We are talking about artists, full stop. NFT artists are artists, full stop.”

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