The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) this week announced the launch of an interactive, NFT-enabled digital initiative designed to encourage users to experiment with creating art on the blockchain.
The program, “MoMA Postcard,” will debut later this month. This allows participants to send digital chain letters with 15 blank ‘stamps’ across the blockchain to employees of their choice. Together, the 15 participants in one postcard will build a joint work of art one by one, in which all “stamps” are tailored to a specific theme.
“This is an opportunity to experiment with NFTs and blockchain technology in an accessible and creative way that we hope will inspire connections and conversations within the world of digital art,” the museum said in a statement. The NFTs are minted on Tezos.
@GrantYun2 asked each artist to use the field to draw landscapes and embrace nature in “Hazel-Gradient-Symmetry.” pic.twitter.com/RyTd5rkniI
— MoMA The Museum of Modern Art (@MuseumModernArt) October 3, 2023
To kick off the program, MoMA invited 15 digital artists to collaborate on a series, entitled “First 15,” of the first postcards chained as part of the project. Each of these 15 cards, which were digitally passed on to all artists, was tailored to a unique assignment; participating artists included Dmitri Chernyak, Casey Reas, Grant Yun, Anna LuciaAnd Kim Asendorfamong other things.
For example, the artist duo from Madrid Operatorwhich also participated in ‘First 15’, asked each artist to design a stamp indicating the ‘Number of hearts you have broken (romantic love or not)’, using ‘Black pixels, white background, numeric characters only ‘.
Operator’s “First 15” MoMA postcard, in which all 15 participating artists responded to the prompt “number of hearts you’ve broken.” Courtesy: MoMA
Dmitri Cherniak, whose generative digital artwork ‘The Goose’ sold for no less than 50 euros $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction in June, he asked the same group to simply: “Make a pixel goose.”
“Watching these first fifteen cards fly around the world in real time makes it clear that this is a global art movement, a decentralized residency or gallery where imagination is limitless and sparked in truly unprecedented ways,” said Sasha Stiles, another participating artist . said in a statement.
Musée d’Orsay embraces NFTs to reach new audiences
The MoMA, formerly the second most visited contemporary art museum in the world NFTs sold in 2021 with digital artist Refik Anadol, who created on-chain artworks inspired by the museum’s archives. MoMA has also offered a free NFT claim for visitors visiting the museum, which features Anadol’s AI-powered digital artwork Currently showing ‘Unsupervised’.
But Tuesday’s announcement signals a desire for a longer-term relationship with blockchain technology and the digital arts ecosystem, a relationship shared by a growing number of major arts institutions.
Last week the Musée d’Orsay announced one years of cooperation with the Tezos Foundation bring blockchain-enabled artworks and on-chain digital artists into conversation with the museum’s collections and exhibitions. As part of that partnership, digital artists will soon be invited to the Orsay to create NFTs inspired by the museum’s Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces; a similar program currently running at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Earlier this year, the Center Pompidou, France’s most famous museum of modern art, organized debuted with an exhibition dedicated to exploring art created on the blockchain.
