Even as NFTs plunge, digital artists find museums calling

The lobby of the Museum of Modern Art will glow this winter, not with the twinkling lights of the holidays, but the swirling computer landscapes of a digital artist whose popularity soared during the frenzy of speculation surrounding NFTs.

Last year, Refik Anadol plugged more than 138,000 images and text material from the museum’s publicly available archive into a machine learning model to create hundreds of colorful abstractions he called “machine hallucinations,” and sold them as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.

It was the beginning of a quiet partnership between Anadol, a 37-year-old Turkish-American artist, and MoMA curators Michelle Kuo and Paola Antonelli—and it was a financial boon for both parties. Some of the blockchain-based artworks were sold for thousands of dollars, while the most exclusive sold for $200,000. Within the fine print of the transactions was a note that the museum would earn almost 17 percent of all primary sales and 5 percent of all secondary sales. For MoMA, struggling with pandemic attendance dropouts — from about three million in normal times to 1.65 million last year — growing a digital audience makes good economic sense.

Now, the curators have invited Anadol to dig deeper into the MoMA archives for the new computer-driven installation, “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised,” which starts on November 19 in the Gund lobby and runs until March 5.

“Being open to new technology is part of our responsibility,” said Antonelli, the museum’s senior curator for the Department of Architecture and Design, who is known for guiding MoMA’s acquisitions of historic video games such as Pac-Man and the @ symbol. “We never jump on new technology, but rather realize that we have to keep up with the world.”

Until recently, most museums had rejected digital art collections in favor of the paintings and sculptures that still dominate their galleries. But after budgets tightened and attendance plateaued during the coronavirus pandemic, the industry has begun to embrace artistic experiments involving blockchain, virtual reality and artificial intelligence programs. Curators want to connect with younger, tech-obsessed audiences and capture the interest of crypto millionaires who might donate.

At the Guggenheim Museum, leaders are hiring a new assistant curator of digital art that will be funded by LG, the electronics company, which also pays for a $100,000 annual award to artists who make “groundbreaking achievements in technology-based art.” Conservators are also exploring the possibility of uploading ownership records to the blockchain, which could help art historians research the collection.

Naomi Beckwith, the museum’s deputy director and chief curator, said that while some trustees had been focused on the financial possibilities of NFTs, her curatorial team had a broader mandate to follow artists into the metaverse, busy shorthand for new online technologies.

“We have reached a critical point where the technology available to artists has far exceeded what museums can offer in terms of resources. So we have to step up,” Beckwith said. “If artists work with technology, then we must be able to keep it.”

Historically, museums have been reluctant to embrace technologies that might require conservation tools and curatorial expertise beyond the classical traditions of painting and sculpture. It took almost a century after photography was invented before the artistic medium received its first museum exhibition in the United States. This 1910 exhibit at Buffalo’s Albright Art Gallery was organized to demonstrate that photography could be a visual form of artistic expression at a time when most people viewed cameras as documentary tools.

Things move much faster today. Just 14 years after blockchain was invented through the development of cryptocurrency, the same gallery, now called the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, will host an online auction that curator Tina Rivers Ryan billed as the first survey of blockchain art by a major American museum. “Peer to Peer” opens in November with commissioned works by more than a dozen digital artists, including Rhea Myers, LaTurbo Avedon and Itzel Yard (known online as IX Shells).

A spokesman for the museum, Woody Brown, was careful to avoid saying his institution was selling NFTs, preferring to describe the offerings as “digital artworks by artists engaged in blockchain technologies.” However, many of the artists included in the exhibit are known to sell NFTs, and the show is co-produced with Feral File, an NFT marketplace that also hosted the sale for Anadol’s collaboration with MoMA.

The sharp decline in the NFT market, with trading volume plunging nearly 97 percent from record highs, is already beginning to change the way digital art is perceived. Some artists and curators avoid the term because of its association with speculation and fraud. Others complain that marketers have used the acronym as a catch-all over the past two years, wrongly lumping together different types of digital art to take advantage of the bull market.

Christiane Paul, the Whitney Museum’s curator of digital art, described the situation as a mixed blessing for her field. “On the upside, NFTs have created more interest and awareness for digital art,” she said. “But one of my pet peeves is how people now equate digital art with JPEGs and spinning little GIFs when it’s a medium that has a 60-year history of everything from algorithmic drawings to internet art.”

Paul was recently promoted after nearly 20 years as an assistant professor at the Whitney. What changed? NFTs.

“Usually I had to sell the idea of ​​digital art to the upper administrative levels,” she said. “Now trustees come to me asking if Whitney should be in the metaverse.”

Paul has used his expanded position to advocate for more digital art in the museum, which commissions works annually through the Artport program. She said her job now was to fill the gaps in the museum’s collection, starting with the early days of computer drawings in the 1960s by artists such as Manfred Mohr and the software experiments of the 1980s.

She said the museum has already collected several NFTs, including work from Eve Sussman’s “89 Seconds Atomized” series, which breaks down the artist’s video “89 Seconds at Alcazár” into 2,304 unique works that can be put back together by collectors.

The curator said her approach was cautious. “We see NFTs as a natural extension of artistic practice in the digital field,” Paul explained.

However, some museums have been a little more adventurous, and the many initiatives MoMA had planned for the past year are beginning to bear fruit.

With its share of the profits from Anadol’s “machine hallucinations,” the museum hired a young employee named Madeleine Pierpont to help develop projects in the digital world. On a recent job posting, these included building membership and retail programs involving NFTs; facilitating blockchain projects for artists; and researching partnerships with the crypto community.

In September, a foundation for media mogul William Paley, who founded CBS, announced it would auction off a bunch of artwork from his collection (including pieces by Picasso, Rodin and Renoir) for an estimated $70 million. The proceeds are intended to help MoMA further expand its digital footprint, and the museum’s director, Glenn Lowry, did not rule out the possibility of buying NFTs with the money when asked by The Wall Street Journal.

“We’re conscious of the fact that we’re lending an imprimatur when we acquire pieces,” he told The Journal, “but that doesn’t mean we should avoid the domain.”

Over the past year, MoMA curators and trustees have quietly met with several blue-chip NFT artists such as Mike Winkelmann (known as Beeple), Justin Aversano, and Dmitri Cherniak. And during a recent event at the museum on how artists are using new online technologies, curators gave attendees a free NFT they had commissioned from artist Stephanie Dinkins.

Collectors have also made overtures. Ryan Zurrer, a venture capitalist in the crypto industry who owns one of Anadol’s NFTs, said he was interested in donating his issue to the museum.

Kuo, the MoMA curator, declined to discuss whether the museum would take Zurrer up on his offer. For now, she remains focused on installing Anadol’s living vortex of algorithmically generated visions in the museum’s lobby. The artist’s machine learning program will continuously develop new images, combining information from the museum’s collections with real-time data from the environment inside and outside the building, including movement and climate.

“Refik bends data—which we usually associate with rational systems—into a realm of surrealism and irrationality,” Kuo said. “His interpretation of MoMA’s dataset is essentially a transformation of the history of modern art.”