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NFTs are coming to the epicenter of the Parisian art world.
On Friday, the Center Pompidou – home to France’s National Museum of Modern Art – announced plans for a new exhibition examining the relationship between art and the blockchain that will feature NFTs from the valuable CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs projects, among works by 12 other digital artists.
CryptoPunk #110 and Autoglyph #25 were both donated to the Center Pompidou and will be displayed at the museum this spring, along with 16 other NFT works from a global selection of artists.
The exhibition will mark the first time the Center Pompidou has accepted NFTs into its collection, which houses masterpieces by pioneering artists such as Vassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse and Frida Kahlo, among others. The Center Pompidou is the largest modern art museum in Europe.
“Seeing CryptoPunk #110 displayed at the Center Pompidou, arguably the world’s most prestigious contemporary art museum, is a great moment for the Web3 and NFT ecosystem, and we are honored to help drive this cultural conversation,” said Yuga Labs- co-founder Greg Solano. said in a statement.
Yuga, who owns CryptoPunk’s IP, donated the NFT to the museum through Punk’s Legacy Project. This initiative, which seeks to place CryptoPunks in prominent museums around the world, began with a donation of CryptoPunk #305 to Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art in November.
Coined on the Ethereum blockchain, CryptoPunks is one of crypto’s most dominant and enduringly popular Profile Picture (PFP) NFT collections. There are 10,000 CryptoPunks in circulation, the cheapest of which can be purchased for 63 ETH, or about $95,000, according to CoinGecko. CryptoPunks have routinely sold for millions of dollars quite a bit, even during the current bear market.
Autoglyphs, meanwhile, are much rarer. The Ethereum-based generative art project from Larva Labs, the original creator of CryptoPunks, has only 512 NFTs in total. The current floor price (or the price of the cheapest listed NFT) for that project is a whopping 249 ETH, or just over $377,000. Larva Labs donated the piece to the Center Pompidou.
Despite the huge amount of capital consistently attracted to such “blue chip” NFT projects, some in the art community have scoffed at the medium as a lack of artistic legitimacy.
Perhaps for that reason, Yuga Labs — which also created the dominant Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection — took Friday’s announcement as an opportunity to assert the artistic merits of such projects.
“Partnering with the Center Pompidou, one of the most iconic contemporary art museums in the world, means that CryptoPunks is rightly recognized as an important art movement by the industry,” Yuga said in a statement.
But it remains unclear what function, exactly, CryptoPunk #110 will play in the Pompidou’s exhibition.
“With this new acquisition, it’s less a question of taking an interest in the pop culture phenomenon of ‘collectibles’ (those collections of images sold as NFTs, like Bored Apes or CryptoPunks), than exploring the boldest uses of this technology” , the museum said in announcing its upcoming NFT-focused exhibit.
The exhibition’s curators went on to detail how the NFT space, despite initially asserting itself with “homogeneous” and “heavily publicized” projects such as CryptoPunks and Bored Apes, soon gave way to more complex experiments, which appear to be the exhibition’s focus. The exhibition also shows NFTs from artists such as Jonas Lund, Rafael Rozendaal and Jill Magid.
