What could be more romantic than giving your loved one a piece of the Metaverse for Valentine’s Day. This is the digital simulation of spaces and worlds in which digital life is to take place in the future. Different rules apply there than on planet Earth. So when the Belvedere Museum in Vienna offers a piece of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” to ten thousand metaversians, one must first say goodbye to old-fashioned ideas about art, possessions and materials. Because of course the museum people don’t cut the painting, which he finished in 1909 with lots of gold paint, into ten thousand pieces. They did that with a digital copy. All these image sections are now transformed into so-called NFTs. These are files that are stored as individual pieces using the blockchain encryption process. This has been discussed in digitally interested circles for some time much discussed.
There are already all sorts of things as NFT, mostly pictures and videos. John Lennon’s son Julian just auctioned off an NFT of the afghan coat his father wore in the film ‘Magical Mistery Tour’ for nearly $17,000 and one of Paul McCartney’s lyrics to ‘Hey Jude’ for nearly $70,000. NFT artist Pak helped whistleblower Julian Assange raise $54 million in legal fees last week with a collaborative work. In contrast, 1850 euros for a piece of the kiss are inexpensive. Even more so because you can add a personal dedication to the NFT. uh
Why shouldn’t a museum benefit from the new market?
Anyone who thinks all this is nonsense is obviously still living in the 20th century. Belvedere boss Wolfgang Bergmann definitely sees NFTs as a new chapter in cultural history: “In the development of art there are always such turning points where some people shake their heads at what money is being spent on, and a few decades later the artists are told by the media have been ironed, then the stars.” Digital art that cannot be framed has been around for a long time. Nam June Paik, for example, exhibited his television image sculptures in Wuppertal as early as 1963. Not to mention the performance art with which Marina Abramović became a world star, of which there are usually only documentaries.
Nevertheless, the new world of NFTs has little to do with the love of work and art. The company ArtèQ, with which the Belvedere works, presents itself on your website quite blatantly as “the first investment fund for NFT art”. Similar to cryptocurrencies, prices for these types of digital works rise (and fall) as steeply as the roller coaster tracks from the Olympic loop at Oktoberfest.
But why shouldn’t a museum benefit from this new market? Art is already an object of speculation anyway, which has made new acquisitions so difficult for these very houses. “When there’s a new business area, it’s our job as a museum to get involved,” says Bergmann. It is easy to calculate how many millions would be raised if all NFTs sold. It would not be enough for a new Klimt. His better-known works fetched hundreds of millions at the last auctions.