The Paris museum gives troubled NFT art scene a big showcase

NFTs, the symbols of the crypto world linked to digital works of art, have been given an exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, despite an almost total collapse in price and cultural cachet.

Pompidou, a popular attraction in the Marais district of the French capital, has opened the exhibition in its minimalist halls dedicated to NFTs that could give the digital art form a much-needed boost.

Multi-million dollar Blockbuster sales helped boost publicity in 2021, and prices skyrocketed amid a lack of regulation and general confusion about what the digital tokens were.

But the value of NFT transactions fell 94 percent between 2021 and 2022, from $233 million to $14 million, according to French research firm Artprice.

The organizers of the event at the Pompidou, the first European gallery to start a collection of NFT art, are more concerned with talking about the art than the economy.

“These artists earn a place in art history and their works are guaranteed longevity,” said Marcella Lista, the gallery’s chief curator.

However, the collapse in interest in NFTs along with a major plunge in the value of cryptocurrencies allowed Pompidou to bag many of the works for just a handful of dollars, according to filings on the OpenSea platform.

About half of the works were donated by their creators.

Crypto icons

Among those happily handing over their work was Californian artist Robness, who came to see the show and said it was a “humbling experience” to be included.

He, too, was keen to shift the focus from the fall in prices.

“If you start worrying about market dynamics, you take your energy out and put it elsewhere,” he told AFP.

“It’s not conducive to actually creating.”

Robness compared NFTs to email, an elemental technology that he expects will continue to find uses.

Born at the intersection of technology and artistic provocation, NFT art quickly created its own emblems and myths – and the Pompidou exhibition is steeped in its iconography.

Robness donated a 3D “portrait” of Satoshi Nakamoto, the possibly fictional creator of bitcoin.

Another of the works on display is “Bitchcoin”, a representation of a bitcoin created by Sarah Meyohas in 2015, making it one of the first NFT artworks.

While one of the scene’s most famous emblems, a “cryptopunk”, also gets airing.

Visitors get the experience of a traditional art gallery – whitewashed walls, hanging pictures accompanied by small explanatory cards – but instead of canvas and paper, the digital works are displayed on screens.

Save pixels

If the prices paid for the artworks were surprisingly low, the gallery still had to jump through some pretty tight hoops to acquire them.

NFT art is usually sold on platforms where cryptocurrency is the preferred payment method and proof of ownership is stored on the blockchain.

Lista said accounting rules simply wouldn’t allow Pompidou to go through the convoluted process of buying cryptocurrency to acquire the works, and blockchain records weren’t good enough.

Instead, she said, the works were paid for in euros and contracts were signed under French law.

Then comes the difficulty of storing and insuring the works, which are essentially digital pixels that can be replicated as many times as anyone wants.

Philippe Bertinelli, another of the exhibition’s curators, said copies were kept on multiple servers and in different media.

“Even if a system breaks or something is lost or burned, we can ensure that the works are still safely stored,” he said.