CryptoPunks NFT in Center Pompidou ‘Quite a surprise’: Larva Labs co-founder

Among the original works of art by Matisse and Picasso, visitors to Paris’ famous Center Pompidou can now find a unique new exhibit: a CryptoPunk’s NFT.

It is part of a new exhibition entitled “Policies of the Intangible: From Certificate to Blockchain”, which explores the relationship between blockchain and artistic creation. The exhibition runs until January 2024, and shows works from 13 French and international artists selected by the acquisition committee of the National Museum of Modern Art.

Included among them is CryptoPunk #110, a non-fungible token (NFT) artwork.

“It’s a real honor, of course, but it’s also quite surprising,” said Matt Hall, co-founder of CryptoPunks creators Larva Labs. Decrypt. “It’s been a wild ride, certainly over a relatively short number of years.”

CryptoPunks #110 at Pompidou. Photo: Mattis Meichler/Decrypt.

The NFT was given to the museum by CryptoPunks owners Yuga Labs, as part of the “Punks Legacy Project.” The company behind the enormously popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collection, Yuga Labs acquired intellectual property rights to Larva Labs’ NFT projects CryptoPunks and Meebits in March 2022.

NFT enters the annals of art history

The exhibition also includes examples of crypto art, web art, generative art, pixel art and more.

Marcella Lista and Philippe Bettinelli, the curators of the exhibition, wanted to show the full range of art related to blockchain. Above all, their ambition is to demonstrate how these works and artistic movements fit into the wider history of art.

According to them, it is an “original study of the cryptoeconomy ecosystem and its impact on the definitions and boundaries of artworks, creators, collections and audiences.”

CryptoPunks, for example, fit into the pixel art movement. “We had worked on several games before, with pixel art,” Hall said. “John [Watkinson, the other co-founder of Larva Labs] had drawn many of the graphics for them. He had been experimenting with the character generator using the pixel art style he was used to.”

Larva Labs also has an Autoglyph, from the chain’s first-ever generative art collection, on display. Unlike most NFTs, Larva Labs’ founders figured out a way to store all data, including the image itself, in smart contract.

As Hall points out, “I think what the curators appreciated about the piece was that it has a significant place in the continuity of generative art and computer-generated art from the 1960s onwards.”

Pioneer artists on display

Showcased alongside various iterations of digitally native art is work that nods to blockchain long before the arrival of Bitcoin white paper.

The oldest artwork on display, “The Checkbook”, was conceived in 1959 by French artist Yves Klein. He created these checkbooks to effect transfers of “transferable intangible image sensitivity.”

Buyers become owners of what may be called blank parcels and retain only, as material evidence, the sales receipt made by Klein himself, which takes the form of a check with gold writing.
The displayed artworks have been chosen for their propensity to explore innovative concepts. French artist Fred Forest’s piece, “Network-Parcel,” was the first to be auctioned exclusively online in 1996.

Meanwhile, the work of French-American artist Sarah Meyonas, “Bitch Coin”, represents the first artwork developed directly on the blockchain. By creating a token with a value tied to the artist’s popularity, Sarah Meyonas pioneered the concept of tokenized art.

Sarah Meyona’s ‘Bitch Coin’ at the Pompidou. Photo: Mattis Meichler/Decrypt.

But most importantly, the NFTs acquired by the Center Pompidou now belong to French national heritage.

And as Larva Labs’ Matt Hall explained, seeing them together can be a startling experience.