LACMA Art Museum acquires NFT collection with CryptoPunk, art blocks

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is the latest major art museum to add NFT artwork to its collection, and announced today that it has acquired a series of notable and valuable NFT pieces through donations from notable collectors.

LACMA accepted a donation of 22 tokenized digital artworks from the pseudonym Cozomo de’ Medici, a well-known Crypto Twitter personality. The collection includes CryptoPunks NFT #3831, which last sold for $2.1 million in ETH in 2021.

It also has NFTs from Art blocks, a popular platform that features artwork generated by algorithms distributed on a blockchain network. Art Blocks works from Dmitri Cherniak’s “Ringers” and Monica Rizzoli’s “Fragments of an Infinite Field” projects are included in the set.

Other notable creators whose NFT art was donated to LACMA in the set include noted photographer Justin Aversano, Women’s world artist and creator Yam Karkai, and Claire Silver and Pindar Van Arman – both known for using AI as a tool to generate NFT artwork.

LACMA described the donation from de’ Medici — a collector who has been linked to rapper Snoop Dogg, too a major player in the Web3 world– as the largest collection of blockchain artwork to date acquired by an American art museum.

Interestingly, the LACMA announcement prominently avoids using the term “NFT,” which stands for non-fungible token. The acronym carries a stigma among some Web3 skeptics and mainstream audiences, and some brands have chosen to avoid it. The online discussion platform Reddit, for example, calls its NFTs “Collectable Avatars.”

In an interview with ArtNews, de’ Medici said he and LACMA intentionally chose to call it “blockchain art” or “on-chain art” (or similar) to avoid the controversial NFT tag. “The term NFT has a stigma attached to it, so we’ve moved away from it,” he told the publication.

LACMA is the last major art museum to add NFTs to its collection. Friday Center Pompidou in Paris announced donations of a CryptoPunk and an Autoglyphs NFT, which were contributed by Yuga Labs and Larva Labs respectively. Yuga too donated a CryptoPunk to Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art last November.

In addition to the collection described above, LACMA has also acquired a number of other donated NFTs, including a Chromie Squiggle from artist Erick “Snowfro” Calderon, founder of Art Blocks, as well as an NFT from Tom Sachs’ rocket factory. Calderon told ArtNews that his donated NFT will be the last Chromie Squiggle minted in the 10,000 piece collection.