The Paris Center Pompidou museum opens its first NFT exhibition
The Center Pompidou in Paris has opened the museum’s first exhibition dedicated to works related to the new NFT technology.
The exhibition is called “NFT: The Poetics of the Intangible from Certification to Blockchain” A “non-fungible token,” or NFT, is a digital identifier that authenticates the origin of a virtual good, certifies ownership and prevents it from being copied.
As such, when someone creates a digital content – a photo, a movie or music, the NFT will verify that it is the “genuine” version.
In announcing the exhibition and its new NFT collection, the museum claimed it was the “very first institution dedicated to modern and contemporary art to acquire a group of works dealing with the relationship between blockchain and artistic creation, including the first NFTs.”
The museum also released the transcript of a discussion between Marcella Lista and Philippe Bettinelli, the museum’s curators of the video, sound and new media collection, in which they analyzed the potential of a technology poised to have a major impact on the art world.
“Part of the success of NFTs can be explained by the fact that digital artists can now dispense with the traditional intermediaries of the art world, such as galleries and contemporary art fairs. They are in direct contact with their communities,” Bettinelli said in the transcript.
“This community currently embodies some of the most stimulating artistic debates of our time,” Lista said in the transcript. “The idea was not to be the first, but to assemble a meaningful collection that could testify to the critical and creative appropriation of a new technology by artists, and how it disrupts and shifts the art ecosystem.
One image shown is called “NFT-Archaeology”, which was created by artist Fred Forest. According to the museum’s description of the work, the artist has explained that it is a kind of reinterpretation of a website that was considered the first purely digital work to be sold at an auction house in 1996.
There are 18 works in the exhibition, which runs until January 2024.
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