NFTs are coming to the epicenter of the Parisian art world.
On Friday, the Center Pompidou — home of France’s National Museum of Modern Art — announced plans for a new exhibition that will explore the relationship between art and the blockchain that will feature NFTs from CryptoPunks projects and valuable Autoglyphs, among the work of 12 other digital artists.
Cryptobank #110 And Autoglyph #25 They were donated to the Center Pompidou and will be on display at the museum this spring, along with 16 other NFT works from an international collection of artists.
The exhibition will be the first time that the Center Pompidou will accept NFTs in its collection, which includes masterpieces by leading artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse and Frida Kahlo, among others. The Center Pompidou is the largest museum of modern art in Europe.
The Center Pompidou fait l’acquisition d’un ensemble d’œuvre traitant des entre blockchain et create artistique, dont se premiers NFT! 👾
These are 18 projects by 13 French and international artists that make up a collection.
Plus d’infos 👉 https://t.co/PXL4O2E9vh pic.twitter.com/sNI7EYtK5ECenter Pompidou February 10, 2023
“Seeing CryptoPunk #110 on display at Center Pompidou, arguably the most famous contemporary art museum in the world, is a great moment for Web3 and NFT platforms, and we’re honored to help drive this cultural conversation, said Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano. he said in a statement.
Yuga, which owns the CryptoPunks IP, has donated the NFTs to the museum through the Punks Legacy Project. This initiative, which aims to place CryptoPunks in prominent museums around the world, began with a donation of CryptoPunk #305 to the Miami Institute of Contemporary Art In November.
Made on the Ethereum blockchain, CryptoPunks is one of the most widespread and popular Picture Profile (PFP) NFT pools. There are 10,000 CryptoPunks in circulation, and the cheapest one can be bought for 63 ETH, or approximately $95,000, according to Queen Gekko. CryptoPunks are routinely sold out In millions of dollars Slightly, even during the current bear market.
Meanwhile, Autoglyphs are very rare. The Ethereum-based generative art project from Larva Labs, the original creator of CryptoPunks, contains just 512 NFTs in total. The current floor price (or the cheapest NFT price listed) for this project is 249 ETH, or just over $377,000 USD. Larva Labs donated the piece to the Center Pompidou.
Despite the huge amount of capital that “premium” NFT projects are constantly attracting, some in the art world have derided the medium. which lacks artistic legitimacy.
Perhaps for this reason, Yuga Labs — which also created the dominant Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT cluster — took Friday’s announcement as an opportunity to underscore the technical merits of such projects.
“The partnership with the Center Pompidou, one of the world’s most prestigious contemporary art museums, means that CryptoPunks is rightly recognized as an important art movement by the industry,” Yoga said in a statement.
But it is still not clear what exactly CryptoPunk #110 will play in the Pompidou Gallery.
“With this new acquisition, it is less about being interested in the pop culture phenomenon ‘collectibles’ (those collections of images that are sold as NFTs, like Bored Apes or CryptoPunks), but rather about exploring bolder uses for this technology,” the museum said in announcing its upcoming exhibition. which focuses on NFT.
The curators went on to detail how the NFT space, despite asserting itself first with “monolithic” and “superpopular” projects like CryptoPunks and Bored Apes, quickly gave way to more complex experiments, which seem to be the focus of the exhibition. The gallery also displays NFTs from artists such as Jonas Lund, Rafael Rozendaal, and Jill Magid.