Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have been used by museums, individuals, and metaverse projects to rebrand themselves in the eyes of their followers. Frida Kahlo’s family showed works of art and personal items that had never been seen before at an invite-only event on the Decentraland metaverse platform during its art week in August.
The Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, was the first museum in Europe to tokenize a piece of classical art worth millions of euros. In Ukraine, the Kharkiv Art Museum launched a new NFT collection with Binance to protect cultural heritage and raise money during a conflict in the area.
Concerns do come up, though, as everything is turned into a token. If we can show every piece of art as a digital file, will there be no need for physical art in museums in the future? How exactly does ownership work in these situations?
Hussein Hallak is the founder and CEO of Momentable, a company that helps museums integrate NFTs, to get an idea of how NFTs might change the art world in the future.
Traditional art and museums are adding a Web3 layer, and digital art made just for the Web3 space is being shown in virtual museums. So, Hallak thinks that museums will “inevitably” turn into big NFT galleries.
“We believe everything will be an NFT. Just like a serial number, for every product there will be an NFT.”
Hallak says that if it were easier to use technology, it would already be everywhere. He thinks that for now, museums will mostly use NFTs to check and maintain the items in their collections, and then they will use public digital editions.
Hallak says, “NFTs are an integral tech innovation museums can’t afford to ignore if they want to step into the future but they need to be part of a larger strategic modernization roadmap.”
Hallak agreed that the question was reasonable, but he said that museums’ collections of valuable artifacts wouldn’t lose any value if they were split up. The only thing that has changed is how easy it is to get to. He made a comparison to the rise in stock price that a private company experiences when it goes public:
Art should be made available to more people, such as through fractional ownership or limited digital editions, in order to raise its value. Fractionalization makes it possible for Web3 to use a model of shared ownership. It’s one way the new internet is different from the old one.
If a piece of art is still in the care of a museum or NFT and it’s up for auction, does that mean the museum or NFT really owns it? Hallak thinks that NFTs are more of a way to help improve public art than a way to pass on responsibility. A more likely NFT model is to make multiple digital copies to pay for a public show of artworks and artifacts.
Like the museum in Belgium that was talked about above, NFTs will become a way for museums to make money off of their collections and curators’ knowledge as the world becomes more digital.
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