The Museum of Fashionable Artwork (MoMA) introduced the launch this week of an interactive, NFT-backed digital initiative designed to encourage customers to experiment with creating artwork on the blockchain.
This system, “MoMA Postcard,” will debut later this month. It’ll enable contributors to ship digital chain letters that includes 15 clean “stamps” throughout the blockchain to collaborators of their selecting. Collectively, the 15 contributors in a single postcard will, one after the other, construct out a collaborative artwork piece the place all “stamps” are tailor-made to a selected theme.
“This can be a probability to experiment with NFTs and blockchain expertise in an approachable and inventive means that we hope will encourage connections and conversations throughout the world of digital artwork,” the museum mentioned in a press release. The NFTs are minted on Tezos.
🌻 @GrantYun2 requested every artist to make use of the sphere to attract landscapes and embrace nature in “Hazel-Gradient-Symmetry.” pic.twitter.com/RyTd5rkniI
— MoMA The Museum of Fashionable Artwork (@MuseumModernArt) October 3, 2023
To kick off this system, the MoMA invited 15 digital artists to collaborate on a sequence, titled “First 15,” of the primary postcards to be minted on-chain as a part of the mission. Every of those 15 playing cards, which had been digitally handed round to all artists, was tailor-made to a novel immediate; taking part artists included Dmitri Cherniak, Casey Reas, Grant Yun, Anna Lucia, and Kim Asendorf, amongst others.
For instance, the Madrid-based artwork duo Operator, which additionally participated in “First 15,” requested every artist to design a stamp signifying the “Variety of hearts you’ve damaged (romantic love or not),” utilizing “Black pixels, white background, numeric characters solely.”
Operator’s “First 15” MoMA postcard, wherein all 15 taking part artists reacted to the immediate “variety of hearts you have damaged.” Courtesy: MoMA
Dmitri Cherniak, whose generative digital art work “The Goose” bought for a whopping $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s public sale in June, requested the identical group to, merely, “Create a pixel goose.”
“Watching these first 15 playing cards fly all over the world in actual time has pushed house the truth that it is a world artwork motion, a decentralized residency or gallery the place creativeness is unbounded and ignited in some really unprecedented methods,” Sasha Stiles, one other taking part artist, mentioned in a press release.
Musée d’Orsay Embraces NFTs in Push to Attain New Audiences
The MoMA, which is the second-most visited modern artwork museum on the earth, beforehand bought NFTs in 2021 with digital artist Refik Anadol, who created on-chain artworks impressed by the museum’s archives. MoMA has additionally supplied a free NFT declare for attendees who go to the museum, the place Anadol’s AI-driven digital art work “Unsupervised” is at the moment on show.
However Tuesday’s announcement signifies an urge for food for a longer-term relationship with blockchain expertise and the digital artwork ecosystem, one shared by a rising variety of main artwork establishments.
Final week, the Musée d’Orsay introduced a year-long partnership with the Tezos Basis to deliver blockchain-backed artworks and on-chain digital artists into dialog with the museum’s collections and exhibitions. As part of that partnership, digital artists will quickly be invited into the Orsay to create NFTs impressed by the museum’s Impressionist and Submit-Impressionist masterpieces; a comparable program is at the moment working on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork (LACMA).
Earlier this yr, the Centre Pompidou, France’s highest-profile trendy artwork museum, debuted an exhibition devoted to exploring artwork created on the blockchain.
