Was NFT artist wrong to think she could be exhibited at the Louvre? – ARTnews.com

Photo by Kristy Sparow/Getty Images For David Yurman

This past weekend, NFT artist Claire Silver had some of the worst days of her life. She went from believing her work would be exhibited at the Louvre, the world’s most visited museum, to receiving a public bashing when it was revealed that was not actually the case. Branded a fraud by those in the NFT community and a fool by everyone else, the reigning takeaway from commentators was that Silver should never have thought her works could be displayed in the Louvre. But why not?

To start at the beginning: Silver, who recently gained representation at major talent agency WME, was approached by the organizers of Paris Blockchain Week with an invitation to exhibit her art as part of the conference, scheduled for the end of March. In its fourth edition, Paris Blockchain Week is held at Le Carrousel du Louvre, an underground mall named after two nearby landmarks, the Place du Carrousel and the Louvre.

Silver claims that Paris Blockchain Week organizers misrepresented the location of their sponsored exhibit, making it sound like the Louvre was participating and her work would be displayed in the museum’s hallowed galleries. Excited about what she thought would be the pinnacle of her career, Silver tweeted that she would be exhibiting at the Louvre. Shortly after, Variety picked up the story. Unbelievable regarding the artist’s claims, Zachary Small, a frequent contributor to New York Timesreached out to representatives of the Louvre who confirmed that the museum had no plans to exhibit Silver’s work.

In a now-deleted series of tweets, Silver wrote that the Paris Blockchain Weekend had misrepresented the possibility, and that after the past two years, in which artists in the NFT scene had a sudden entry into the art world’s highest echelon, anything seemed possible.

Silver’s NFTs sold at Sotheby’s last year as part of a Contemporary Art Day auction, and her work entered LACMA’s permanent collection earlier this year. Her peers have not only made money, but have been the subject of exhibitions at respected galleries such as Pace and have been collected by major museums, including the Palais de Tokyo and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum and the Uffizi Gallery have worked with NFT founders to sell NFTs. Tezos is a leading partner for Art Basel’s four fairs around the world, and Art Basel’s parent company, MCH Group, has developed its own blockchain.

The rise was rapid and extreme for artists who have operated outside the art world for the majority of their careers. For Silver, the sudden change in fortune was even more marked. In her interview with Varietyshe described experiencing childhood poverty in the “cornfield town” she grew up in, although she did not specify which one.

In the end, Silver was a victim of the ecosystem that created her. The fortunes of those in the NFT scene were made by leveraging a single, precious resource: hardcore faith. Artists and sellers of NFTs had to convince buyers that these digital works of art, just JPEGs, could be worth something, and that meant a lot of evangelism. According to the amount of press releases that have hit my inbox over the past three years, each project was the most exciting, groundbreaking, and promising collection ever made.

Whether these claims amounted to a scam or a life-changing deal depends on the NFT’s seemingly random whim. society. Why did one PFP collection of animals, like Pudgy Penguins, do better than another? Why were respected artists with deep backgrounds in digital art, such as Harm Van Den Dorpel and Rhea Myers, unable to match the prices of images of monkeys in various outfits? People took advantage of that nonsense to overpromise – sometimes those promises came true, as the small crop of NFT millionaires shows.

And some people, of course, simply lied about things, ran off with the money, and never followed through on the continued “benefit” they had offered. In one case, the 17-year-old creator of an NFT collection called “Iconics” managed to get collectors to buy $100,000 worth of NFTs in a pre-sale; when the date came for the creator to send over the NFT, all the collectors found in their Ether wallets were a bunch of copied and pasted emojis.

HODL – cryptographic for “hold” as in, don’t sell – changed the world by shaping a new and radical digital economy that advocated the recognition of these works’ long-term value and thereby forcing art museums to open up to the visual culture being fomented on the web so that they also miss something. Silver believed because faith got her this far. But faith has its limits.