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LONDON – “Waking up to one of these things is pretty special – having a Leonardo at home,” said Joe Kennedy, director of the contemporary art gallery in London, as he got excited about a neatly framed LED display that’s a digital replica. “Leonardo da Vinci”Portrait of a Musician” shines on the gallery wall. The original was in the Ambrosiana museum in Milan, 800 miles away.
Leonardo was one of “six ultra-high-definition copies of famous paintings over the centuries” that Unit bleakly illuminates.Eternalizing Art HistoryThe exhibition closed on Saturday. It was the last attempt by the show cash-poor museums earn money by selling non-redeemable tokens or NFTs. Last year, NFTs, often tied to the high-flying but volatile Ethereum cryptocurrency, took the art and collectibles market by storm. estimated sales of tens of billions.
Lockdowns and re-prioritized government spending related to the pandemic have put the world’s public museums in a difficult position. under financial pressure. So far, few institutions have explored this digital asset as a fundraising mechanism, despite the tremendous sales figures achieved by NFTs.
Unit and Florence-based technology partner Cinello have signed license agreements with several leading Italian museums to create a hybrid presentation of limited edition LED reproductions in period-style wood frames, each accompanied by a unique NFT.
The same-size digital versions of the Leonardo portrait were offered in nine pieces, starting at €100,000, Caravaggio’s “Bowl of Fruit” (also in Ambrosiana) and Raphael’s “Madonna of the Goldfinch” (in the Uffizi in Florence). up to €500,000 per piece (approximately $110,000 to $550,000). Fifty percent of the sales proceeds went to licensed museums.
On the Friday after the show closes, seven sales for up to 250,000 euros have been confirmed, which include at least one of the Leonardo NFTs.
The collaboration between Unit and Italian museums follows previous attempts by other European institutions to join the NFT caravan. Among them, last September, Russia’s St. There is also the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. NFT copies auction Of his five best-known paintings that raised $444,000.
The Belvedere museum in Vienna has split the digitized image of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” into a one-shot drop. 10,000 NFT. It was priced at 0.65 Ethereum or €1,850 each on Valentine’s Day February 14. Earlier this week, Irene Jaeger, media relations officer at the Austrian museum, said that about 2,400 of these Klimt NFTs have been sold, making about €4.3 million.
produce NFT uses a lot of energyon, especially Ethereum blockchain. According to one estimate, computing power required to print an NFT It produces the same amount of greenhouse gases as a 500-mile journey in a gasoline-powered car. Intangible tokens can make money for a museum, but they also have the potential to create image-damaging environmental problems.
A more environmentally friendly offering of 50 NFTs William Blake printPriced individually as 999 pieces “green” cryptocurrencies According to Bernardine Brocker Wieder, CEO of Vastari, the project’s technical partner (about $3,290 at current values), it has made eight sales since its July launch for the Whitworth museum in Manchester, England.
Environmental issues are one reason why a dozen museums have tried NFTs as an alternative revenue stream so far. The instability and transparency of unregulated cryptocurrencies, the difficulty of finding reliable technology partners, and the cost of such partnerships are also cited by museum experts as reasons for hesitation.
“American museums are nonprofits that operate in public trust,” said Tina Rivers Ryan, a curator specializing in digital art. Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. “This means they have to act slowly, legally and morally.”
But Ryan added that many American museums are currently having internal discussions about how NFTs can be incorporated into their missions. “The market is changing so fast,” he said. “There are legal, environmental and other implications that need to be very carefully considered.”
One institution that wastes no time adopting NFTs as a fundraising tool is the British Museum in London. headed by George OsborneThe museum, a former British finance minister, entered into a five-year private partnership with the Ethereum-based NFT platform in September. LaCollection. The museum has since released several coin drops in prints ranging in size from two to 10,000 using digital copies of works by Katsushika Hokusai and JMW Turner. Prices ranged from $500 to $40,000.
Aware of the environmental sensitivity of large-scale token drops, LaCollection said on its website that “for every NFT minted, we plant a tree that “more than offsets” the carbon footprint of the activity.
Sophie Reid, spokesperson for the project, said in an email that sales “hit seven figures” last month. The British Museum itself declined to comment.
Suse Anderson, an assistant professor in the department of museum studies at George Washington University, said she was skeptical about museums getting involved in the NFT craze. “It runs the risk of being cheated rather than focusing on the job itself. “We need to make the sources as public as possible,” Anderson said.
Still, he acknowledged that there is currently a market for NFTs from museums. “It may not last long, but this is a moment where there is the possibility of fundraising and visibility,” he said.
Currently, this market is relatively small. Publicly funded galleries are wary of cryptocurrencies, and for those immersed in this world, digitized old art doesn’t have the speculative air of “native” NFTs. CryptoPunks or bored monkeys, which can sell millions. As of yet, no museum NFT has made remarkable profits on resale platforms. Offshore.
But what if a reproduction of a masterpiece is so good it looks just like the original, hanging on the wall in a beautiful frame? Don’t these have the potential to sell for millions, or at least hundreds of thousands?
On the final day of the Unit’s “Eternalizing Art History” show, Eve Smith, a lawyer, looked impressed. “This is my second time going. I was totally amazed,” said Smith, looking at the backlit ultra-high-definition digital copy of Francesco Hayez’s 1896 painting embracing lovers.Kiss,” At the Pinacoteca Brera museum in Milan.
“It looks like satin. What you’re looking at seems to have texture, but it doesn’t,” Smith said. “Will I still want to go to Brera? Certainly.”
But would he be prepared to pay the €180,000 price Unit London is asking for to own one of the nine editions and its NFT?
“It depends on how much you like the repro,” Smith said.
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