LONDON — “To wake up to one of these things
is pretty special — to have a Leonardo at home,” said Joe Kennedy, director of
contemporary art dealership
Unit London, enthusing recently about an
elaborately framed LED screen with a digital replica of Leonardo da Vinci’s
“Portrait of a Musician” glowing on his gallery wall. The original was around
1,287km away in the Ambrosiana museum in Milan.
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The Leonardo was one of six ultra-high-resolution
copies of famous paintings from across the centuries in Unit’s moodily lit
“Eternalizing Art History” exhibition, which closed Saturday. The show was the
latest attempt by cash-poor museums to generate money by selling non-fungible
tokens, or NFTs. Last year, NFTs, usually pegged to the high-flying but volatile
ethereum cryptocurrency, took the market for art and collectibles by storm,
with sales estimated in the tens of billions.
Pandemic-related lockdowns and reprioritized
government spending have put the world’s public museums under financial
pressure. Yet so far, despite the formidable sales figures being achieved by
NFTs, few institutions have explored this digital asset as a fundraising
mechanism.
Unit and its
Florence-based technology partner
Cinello forged licensing agreements with
several prominent Italian museums to create a hybrid offering of
limited-edition LED reproductions in period-style wooden frames, each
accompanied by a unique NFT.
Same-size digital versions of the Leonardo portrait,
Caravaggio’s “Bowl of Fruit” (also in the Ambrosiana) and Raphael’s “Madonna of
the Goldfinch” (in the Uffizi in Florence) were offered in editions of nine,
ranging in price from 100,000 to 500,000 euros per piece (around $110,000 to
$550,000). Fifty percent of sales proceeds went back to the licensing museums.
By Friday, after the show had closed, seven sales
had been confirmed, up to 250,000 euros, which included at least one of the
Leonardo NFTs.
The collaboration between Unit and the Italian
museums follows earlier attempts by other European institutions to get on the
NFT bandwagon. Among those are the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg,
Russia, which in September held an auction of NFT replicas of five of its
best-known paintings that raised $444,000.
The
Belvedere museum in Vienna has fractionalized
the digitized image of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” into a one-off drop of 10,000
NFTs. This was released Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, priced at 0.65 ethereum, or
1,850 euros, each. Earlier this week, Irene Jaeger, a media relations officer
at the Austrian museum, said around 2,400 of the Klimt NFTs had been sold,
generating about 4.3 million euros.
Producing NFTs uses a lot of energy, particularly on
the ethereum blockchain. According to one estimate, the computing power
required to mint one NFT generates the same amount of greenhouse gas as a
500-mile journey in a gasoline-powered car. Non-fungible tokens can make money
for a museum, but they also have the potential to create image-damaging
environmental issues.
A more eco-friendly offering of 50 NFTs based on a
William Blake print, individually priced at 999 units of the “green”
cryptocurrency tezos (about $3,290 at current values), has so far attracted
eight sales for the Whitworth museum in Manchester, England, since its release
in July, according to Bernardine Brocker Wieder, chief executive of Vastari,
the project’s technical partner.
Environmental
issues are one reason that barely a dozen museums have so far experimented with
NFTs as an alternative revenue stream. The instability and opacity of
unregulated cryptocurrencies, the difficulty of finding trusted tech partners,
and the cost of such partnerships are also cited by museum professionals as
reasons for hesitancy.
“For each minted NFT, we plant a tree” that “more than offsets” the activity’s carbon footprint.
One institution that has wasted no time embracing
NFTs as a fundraising tool is the British Museum in London. Chaired by
George Osborne, a former British finance minister, the museum entered into an
exclusive five-year partnership in September with ethereum-based NFT platform
LaCollection. The museum has since made several token drops, in editions
varying in size from two to 10,000, using digital copies of works by Katsushika
Hokusai and J.M.W. Turner. Prices ranged from $500 to $40,000.
Aware of the environmental sensitivity of
large-scale token drops, LaCollection said on its website that “for each minted
NFT, we plant a tree” that “more than offsets” the activity’s carbon footprint.
Last month, sales reached “seven figures,” Sophie
Reid, spokeswoman for the project, said in an email. The British Museum itself
declined to comment.
At the moment, the market is relatively small.
Publicly funded galleries are wary of cryptocurrencies, and, for those immersed
in that world, digitalized old art does not have the speculative cool of
“native” NFTs, like CryptoPunks or Bored Apes, which can sell for millions. As
yet, no museum NFTs have achieved attention-grabbing profits on resale
platforms like
OpenSea.
But what if the reproduction of a masterpiece is so
good it looks just like the original, hanging in a beautiful frame on a wall?
Don’t those have the potential to sell for millions or at least hundreds of
thousands?
On the final day of the Unit “Eternalizing Art
History” show, Eve Smith, a lawyer, seemed impressed.
“This is the second time I’ve been. I was completely
astonished,” said Smith, gazing at a backlit ultra-high-resolution digital copy
of Francesco Hayez’s 1896 painting of embracing lovers, “The Kiss,” in the
Pinacoteca Brera museum in Milan.
“It looks like satin. It looks like there’s texture
in what you’re looking at, but there isn’t,” Smith said. “Will I still want to
go to the Brera? Of course.”
But would she be prepared to pay Unit London’s
asking price of 180,000 euros to own one of the edition of nine, plus its NFT?
“It depends how much you like repro,” Smith said.
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