Fred Forest, NFT- Archeology, 2021 © Adagp, Paris 2023 © Fred Forest
Centre Pompidou in Paris has opened the museum’s first show dedicated to works linked to the emerging NFT technology.
The exhibit is called “NFT: The Poetics of the Immaterial from Certification to Blockchain” A “non-fungible token,” or NFT, is a digital identifier that authenticates the origins of a virtual good, certifies ownership, and prevents it from being copied.
As such, when someone creates a digital piece of content — an image, film, or music, the NFT will confirm that it is the “genuine” version.
In announcing the exhibit and its new NFT collection, the museum claimed it was the “very first institution dedicated to modern and contemporary art to acquire a group of works dealing with the relations between blockchain and artistic creation, including its first NFTs.”
The museum also released the transcript of a discussion between Marcella Lista and Philippe Bettinelli, the museum’s curators of the video, audio, and new media collection, where they analyzed the potential of a technology that is poised to have a big impact on the art world.
“Part of the success of NFTs can be explained by the fact that digital artists can now dispense with the traditional intermediaries of the art world, such as galleries and contemporary art fairs. They’re in direct contact with their communities,” Bettinelli said in the transcript.
“This community currently embodies some of the most stimulating artistic debates of the contemporary world,” Lista said in the transcript. “The idea was not to be the first but to bring together a meaningful collection that could testify to the critical and creative appropriation of a new technology by artists, and how that disrupts and shifts the art ecosystem.
One image featured is called “NFT-Archeology,” which was created by artist Fred Forest. According to the museum’s description of the work, the artist has explained that it is a kind of reinterpretation of a website that was considered the first purely digital work to be sold at an auction house in 1996.
There are 18 works in the exhibit, which runs through January 2024.