LONDON – “Waking up to one of these things is pretty special – to have a Leonardo in the house,” Joe Kennedy, the director of contemporary art dealership Unit London, recently said enthusiastically about an elaborately framed LED screen with a digital replica of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Portrait of a Musician” glows on his gallery wall. The original was 800 miles away in the Ambrosiana Museum in Milan.
The Leonardo was one of six ultra-high-resolution copies of famous paintings from centuries past in Unit’s moodily lit “Eternalizing Art History” exhibit, which closed Saturday. The show was the latest attempt by money-poor museums to make money by selling non-replaceable tokens or NFTs. Last year, NFTs, mostly linked to the high-flying but volatile Ethereum cryptocurrency, took the art and collectibles market by storm, with estimated sales of tens of billions.
Pandemic-related lockdowns and reprioritisation of government spending have put financial strain on the world’s public museums. But so far, despite the formidable sales achieved by NFTs, few institutions have explored this digital asset as a fund-raising mechanism.
Unit and its Florence-based technology partner Cinello entered into licensing agreements with several leading Italian museums to create a hybrid offering of limited edition LED reproductions in historic style wooden frames, each accompanied by a unique NFT.
Digital versions of the same format 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 print runs of nine, ranging in price from 100,000 euros to €500,000 each (approximately $110,000 to $550,000). Fifty percent of the sales proceeds went back to the licensing museums.
On the Friday following the show, seven sales of up to €250,000 had been confirmed, including at least one from the Leonardo NFTs.
The collaboration between Unit and the Italian museums follows previous attempts by other European institutions to get on the NFT train. One is the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, which held an auction last September of NFT replicas of five of his best-known paintings for $444,000.
The Belvedere Museum in Vienna has fractionated the digitized image of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” into a one-time drop of 10,000 NFTs. It was released on February 14, Valentine’s Day, and costs 0.65 Ethereum, or €1,850 each. Earlier this week, Irene Jaeger, a media relations officer at the Austrian Museum, said about 2,400 of these Klimt NFTs had been sold, raising about €4.3 million.
Producing NFTs takes a lot of energy, especially on the Ethereum blockchain. According to one estimate, the computing power needed to make one NFT generates the same amount of greenhouse gases as a 500-mile drive in a gasoline car. Non-replaceable tokens can generate money for a museum, but they can also lead to image-damaging environmental problems.
A more eco-friendly offering of 50 NFTs based on a William Blake imprint, priced separately at 999 units of the “green” cryptocurrency tezos (about $3,290 at current values), has so far brought in eight sales for the Whitworth Museum in Manchester, England, since its release in July, according to Bernardine Brocker Wieder, the chief executive of Vastari, the project’s technical partner.
Environmental concerns are one of the reasons why barely a dozen museums have experimented with NFTs as an alternative revenue stream to date. The instability and opacity of unregulated cryptocurrencies, the difficulty of finding trusted technical partners, and the cost of such partnerships are also cited by museum professionals as reasons for hesitation.
“American museums are nonprofit organizations that operate on the trust of the public,” said Tina Rivers Ryan, a digital art curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. “This means they are legally and morally bound to move slowly.”
However, Ryan added that many US museums are currently having internal discussions about how to incorporate NFTs into their mission. “The market changes so quickly,” she says. “There are legal, environmental and other implications that need to be thought through very carefully.”
One institution that has wasted no time in embracing NFTs as a fundraising tool is the British Museum in London. Chaired by George Osborne, a former British Chancellor of the Exchequer, the museum entered into an exclusive five-year partnership with Ethereum-based NFT platform LaCollection in September. The museum has since made several token drops, in print runs ranging from two to 10,000, featuring digital copies of works by Katsushika Hokusai and JMW 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 every NFT struck, we plant a tree” that “more than offsets” the activity’s carbon footprint.
Last month, sales hit “seven figures,” Sophie Reid, spokeswoman for the project, said in an email. The British Museum itself declined to comment.
Suse Anderson, an assistant professor of museum studies at George Washington University, said she was skeptical about museums getting involved in the mania for NFTs. “It threatens to be a gimmick rather than focusing on the work itself. We need to make resources as available to the public as we can,” Anderson said.
Still, she acknowledged that there was a market for museum NFTs at this point. “It may not be long, but this is a time when there is an opportunity for fundraising and visibility,” she said.
At the moment, the market is relatively small. Government-funded galleries are wary of cryptocurrencies, and for those immersed in that world, digitized ancient art doesn’t have the speculative coolness of ‘native’ NFTs, like CryptoPunks or Bored Apes, which can sell for millions. So far, no museum NFTs have made notable gains on resale platforms, such as OpenSea.
But what if the reproduction of a masterpiece is so good that it looks just like the original, hanging in a nice frame on the wall? Don’t they have the potential to sell for millions, or at least hundreds of thousands?
On the last 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 amazed,” Smith said, staring at an ultra-high-resolution, backlit digital copy of Francesco Hayez’s 1896 painting of embracing lovers, “The Kiss,” at the Pinacoteca Brera Museum in Milan.
“It looks like satin. It seems 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? Naturally.”
But would she be willing to pay Unit London’s €180,000 asking price to own one of the nine copies, plus the NFT?
“It depends on how much you like repro,” Smith said.
