It was 2021 and the Musée d’Orsay had a problem.
The Paris museum, which boasts the world’s largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces, has struggled to attract visitors amid the volatile uncertainty of Covid lockdowns. Some museum officials were confident that the French people’s commitment to cultural enlightenment would prevail, and that museum attendance would soon return to pre-pandemic levels. But the doors were open and no large crowds had shown up.
“The French came less, young people came less,” said Guillaume Roux, development director of Orsay Declutter SCENE. “We realized we had to fight to win back lost visitors.”
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In October 2021, the museum got a new president, Christophe Leribault, whose top priority immediately became opening the Orsay to the masses – in Roux’s words: ‘talking to everyone, even those who had never been to the museum or might never come.’
Leribault commissioned an internal team to investigate NFTs and blockchain; The new technology sparked conversations in the art world, and the museum director wanted to find a way to leverage it to attract new and younger audiences to the Orsay.
Nearly two years later, the fruits of that exploration have come to fruition: On Friday, the museum announced a year-long partnership with the Tezos Foundation to bring blockchain-enabled artworks and on-chain digital artists into conversation with the collections and exhibitions of the museum.
To kick off the collaboration, the museum will offer online digital souvenirs to visitors of the upcoming exhibition ‘Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: The Final Months’, which opens on October 3 and will discover works created by the famous Dutch painter in the last two months of his life.
Starting next Tuesday, museum visitors and online collectors can purchase two digital souvenirs related to the exhibition: one is an augmented reality work depicting Van Gogh’s final palette, the other is an original digital artwork inspired by Van Gogh and crafted by KERUa French blockchain culture project.
Both pieces are captured on the Tezos Blockchain, and will include gamified elements that offer holders the opportunity to win prizes, including lifetime passes to the Orsay and invitations to opening galas at the museum. A total of 2,300 NFTs of each variety will be made available €20 each (about $21).
A view of one of Van Gogh’s digital souvenirs on a mobile phone. With thanks to: KERU, Musée d’Orsay
The Orsay and the Tezos Foundation will also collaborate over the coming year on a series of conferences and educational programs aimed at introducing the museum’s audience to emerging technologies, including blockchain. Furthermore, in early 2024, the museum plans to invite a number of digital artists working on the blockchain to create NFT collections inspired by artworks from Orsay’s permanent collection. a similar program currently running at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Valerie Whitacre, head of art at TriliTech, a London-based Tezos adoption center that partnered with the Orsay to create its blockchain-related initiatives, sees the museum’s new programs as perfectly in line with its deep connection to the Impressionist movement.
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“The Musée d’Orsay has a long history of collecting artists who might not otherwise have been accepted by traditionalists,” Whitacre said. Decode SCENE. “And there’s a wonderful sentiment from the team there that experimenting with crypto art, experimenting with how to engage an audience that is consuming art in a new way, ties into the overall history of the museum.”
Although the Orsay has recovered to pre-pandemic tourism levels (the Monet, Manet, Degas and Gaugin-studded institution is currently the tenth most visited museum in the world), staff sees the pandemic-induced push abroad technologies as a silver lining.
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“Today it is not a question of how many people we can bring to the museum,” said de Roux of Orsay. “It is more a matter of being a museum that is aware of its time, of a museum that talks to new generations.”
But despite the return of large crowds to the Orsay, some of the urgency that rocked the storied institution in 2021 remains.
“We are a 19th century museum,” Roux continued. “If we don’t launch initiatives to talk differently, to represent ourselves differently, we will end up in an old museum from a very old century – very, very soon.”