Before and after Beeple, NFTs help futureproof museums
In lieu of exclusively associating the recent NFT craze with the bloated, attention-grabbing Beeple sale at Christie’s and the subsequent mainstreaming of the digital token by those eager to capitalize, consider instead, that NFTs, existed long before and will exist long after because they solve an important problem in collections and museums, digital scarcity.
To reference the first article I wrote in this series about blockchain deployed for provenance verification, consider NFTs as an extension of provenance. I described how companies use blockchains to verify the trail of ownership of an object. Similarly, NFTs do the same thing but can point to physical as well as a digital or intangible “object” like files. You can now own a mass-produced jpeg, for example, because we can with absolute certainty trace its ownership back to you.
In this post, I present a series of articles that better explain the possibilities of NFTs as a logical next step for collections and museums as the world digitizes more and more.
To begin, this Los Angeles Times article, “$69 million for digital art? The NFT craze explained” written right after the Beeple sale in March 2021 ably sums up the then burgeoning craze with collectibles and clearly defines the NFT.
An NFT — which stands for non-fungible token — is like a certificate of authenticity for an object, real or virtual.
Further, this Tech Crunch article, “No, NFTs aren’t copyrights”, clarifies the difference between ownership and copyright and the space the NFTs occupies in that matrix. The gray area produced by the lack of understanding has led to many cases of fraud as people create NFTs of other’ work or possessions. Clarify what the purchaser owns:
So unless an external agreement is made between the artist and the buyer, the bundle of copyrights to an NFT still belong to the original artist. The NFT purchaser owns nothing more than a unique hash on the blockchain with a transactional record and a hyperlink to the file of the artwork.
Like a solar array to the sun, museums, likewise, can constructively harvest NFTs to benefit themselves and their communities as Jason Bailey (a.k.a. Artnome) points out in this article from his website “Why Museums Should Be Thinking Longer Term About NFTs”.
Just as physical assets (drawings, paintings, sculptures, etc.) draw the public to physical museums, NFTs of their iconic masterworks will become the draw to museum’s digital properties in the metaverse long into the future.
Of special interest in this article is how the Whitworth Gallery at Manchester University used an NFT sale for community benefit.
Continuing this thread of museums employing NFTs, a Vastari article, “5 Museums Ahead in the NFT Game”, demonstrates the uses of early adopters and includes many other links to other articles.
Lastly, Artnet’s “Museums Are Dipping Their Toes Into the Wild World of NFTs. Here Is What They Need to Know Before Plunging All the Way In” points out that there are some skeptics around the deployment of NFTs by museums.
In a recent discussion at Studio Bonn, artist Hito Steyerl laid out her skepticism about blockchain, crypto, and NFTs, as well as the cultural sphere’s optimism about them. “The centralization of power is happening within the crypto-sphere,” warned the artist.
Of course, we can and will continue to debate the validity and use of NFTs, but I, for one, want to better understand and have a serious discussion about them. Many more articles exist on the topic and I only provide a few for the sake of making my point about the utility of the tool.
