Unlikely Bedfellows: How NFTs and Museums are Forging Digital Art’s New Frontiers

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lorna. Image credit: Lynn Hershman Leeson; Photo © ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Photo: Lynn Hershman Leeson

‘I think there’s a greater chance the masterpieces of the 21st century will be digital rather than physical,’ shares Robert Alice, artist, curator, and author of Taschen’s 2024 blockbuster title, On NFTs. ‘That’s where culture is most raw and exciting.’

But how would such a shift impact the hallowed halls of our museums?

The hushed atmosphere of galleries has already been splintered – we’re used to seeing screens, installations, and interactive elements as part of displays. But as Wallpaper presciently notes, with the death of the mall and decline of the high street, museums really are the ‘last great public space.’ Can they still fulfil their mission of acquisition, preservation, and stewardship in the digital age, or will they mutate into something unrecognisable?

Sarah Friend, Evolutionary Games and Spatial Chaos, Letters to Nature. Image credit: 2024 Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Alice sees future magnum opuses as built on blockchain and likely created using AI. Despite being a traditionally trained art historian, this oncoming tidal wave that many fear will obliterate art as we know it hasn’t intimidated Alice. In fact, he finds it so exciting he’s made it his niche.

Here’s a quick CV: Alice creates his own works, and these have been collected by public institutions such as the Centre Pompidou and Los Angeles County Museum of Art; he’s lectured at the likes of Oxford University and Columbia; and flexed his academic muscle with his book, which is described as, ‘the first major art historical survey text’ on ‘all facets of the NFT ecosystem’.

He is the spokesperson that NFTs (non-fungible tokens) badly need. After bursting onto our cultural consciousness back in 2021-22, NFTs have been plagued with a PR problem. Their newness made them fertile ground for scams and the backlash dubbed them ‘worthless’. But Alice is cerebral, eloquent, and gives off the distinct impression that he just knows his stuff.

‘The French are more provocative, they like to go to the edge of culture.’

And far from seeing public collections as old-fashioned or unattainable, he considers them the natural partner to digital art of all stripes. To his mind, institutions need to acquire digital arts because they will become so historically important. ‘I don’t think museums are trying to gatekeep, I see that as a commercial thing – you gatekeep because you have an economic advantage. The beautiful thing about museums is they’re not economically engaged so they go where culture is most interesting.’

Andy Warhol, Amiga Computer Image – Andy Fright Wig. Image credit: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by DACS/ Artimage, London 2024

‘The Centre Pompidou is leading the way in terms of building a world-class digital art chain-based collection. The French are more provocative, they like to go to the edge of culture’.

Meanwhile, to his knowledge, no UK institution has collected an NFT. After all, budgets are capped. Are museums willing to gamble on investing in an NFT when that money could go towards acquiring a painting?

However, it is a little-known fact that digital art has formed part of numerous public collections since the 20th century. Melanie Lenz, curator for digital art, architecture, photography and design at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) tells me, ‘The first examples of computer-generated images acquired by the V&A were purchased in 1969.’ These lithographic prints were shown in one of the first ever exhibitions devoted to the relationship between the computer and the arts. Cybernetic Serendipity took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in 1968.

Kyle McDonald, Exhausting a Crowd. Image credit: Kyle McDonald

‘However,’ Lenz continues, ‘it wasn’t until the late 2000s that the V&As digital art holdings were significantly enhanced with the acquisition of some 250 works from the collection of the American art historian Patric Prince, and the archives of the Computer Arts Society.’ The word ‘acquisition’ is important here; it implies the V&A deemed it worthy to accept and possibly purchase works.

Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), FloodNet. Image credit: Carmin Kasaric for ECD. Courtesy of Carmin Karasic

‘There’s a very long curatorial process even if you just want to donate a piece,’ says Alice. Usually, museums don’t want to diminish the quality of their collection. ‘In the NFT world, there’s no shortage of money and no shortage of people who want to donate their works,’ continues Alice, ‘So 99% of all NFTs in institutions have been donated. But now, finally, I’m beginning to see museums buying.’

Marlène Corbun, head curator at laCollection, a platform that seeks to bridge the traditional art market and the tech world, agrees, noting ‘it’s opening slowly – some are keener to innovate than others.’ And sometimes, it boils down to a thing as simple as whether someone likes what you do. Corbun, who has brokered several partnerships between public institutions and Robert Alice says, ‘I think they fell in love with the artwork. If I’d showed a different artist that day maybe the project would have never happened.’

She goes on to note that museums face other barriers to building their digital departments. Some institutions aren’t able to accommodate contemporary art curators, meaning this gap in staffing and expertise will reflect in acquisitions. Equally, she describes the process of storing a national collection’s first digital asset as, ‘a real hurdle’. These need to be kept in a crypto wallet, and with a public institution the process of setting one up becomes arduous, demanding verification from multiple government bodies.

‘With contemporary art there’s always a phase of rejection.’

As Lenz from the V&A neatly summarises, ‘Digital artworks present new questions in terms of what it means to care for complex objects in perpetuity and the applied planetary impact, what infrastructure is required, what are a work’s dependencies, and how are they catered for into the future? The list goes on.’

Once the wallet has been set up, however, you can have millions of NFTs. In this way, the digital medium can tackle one of museums’ biggest historic challenges: storage. But if you amass oodles of such pieces just because you can, how do you ensure the quality of a collection?

Ibiye Camp, 3D-printed model of Campbell Street in Freetown. Image credit: 2024 Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Audiences understand as well as artists do that being shown in a museum confers legitimacy. It is often this vague concept of what ‘deserves’ to be elevated that governs people’s emotional response to exhibits (think of the familiar comment: ‘my five-year-old could make that!’).

Both Alice and Corbun fidget somewhat impatiently when asked about the artistic merit of digital pieces. ‘This conversation has been happening for over 100 years,’ says Alice, ‘and it’s generally been proved posthumously that when art is called into question it turns out to be the very tip of contemporary culture.’ Meanwhile Corbun notes that every important movement from the Impressionists to the YBAs provoked negative responses. ‘With contemporary art there’s always a phase of rejection.’

So, what about the fiery debate surrounding AI and authorship? If images are made by people generating them via prompts to a machine, is this the ‘best of humanity’ that museums are supposed to showcase?

‘I actually see AI as a creation of a new kind of artist,’ Corbun reveals. ‘When you work with qualitative artists they’re looking to express their own style and create their DNA.’ She sees AI as a tool that can be moulded to our needs, help us reach new heights and yet never cross into copyright infringement.

Corbun is, overall, less bullish on NFTs than Robert Alice. There is a clubby aspect to NFTs which sets them apart from high art. Fans can buy tokens of animals or cartoon characters to gain entry to a community, and this mishmash of projects can be overwhelming to filter through (Alice doesn’t see this as an issue, ‘we could open up the aperture of what’s deemed the aesthetic of high art’, he grins).

Julieta Gil, Nuestra Victoria. Image credit: Julieta Gil. Courtesy of the Artist.

However, at scale, digital art can really mesmerise and enchant viewers – as we’ve seen with the commercial success of ventures like Frameless. ‘I feel that with digital art, more experimental and immersive pieces can connect with a broader audience. They are not thinking of art history, they’re just experiencing the work.’

Yet by imbedding more digital art into our visitor experience we may be ushering a new era. The days of strolling through quiet rooms, peering at pictures cordoned off by velvet ropes, might become relics of the past.

Corbun sees the future of exhibitions as a hybrid one, a place where artistic mediums complement one another rather than jostle for supremacy. These works should be grouped – video, NFT, sculpture, sketch – in ways that form a dialogue. ‘Working with physical art is very important to me,’ she adds, ‘but digital art can carry messages that historical works cannot regarding topics society is grappling with right now. Post-humanism, for example.’

Arthur Servin, who represents Monnaie de Paris, a French institution founded in AD 846 which has acquired the works of Alice, beautifully phrases the role of digital acquisitions as: ‘Giving substance to the abstract and contextualising the concrete.’ He goes on to add it’s ‘the opportunity to present a subject that artifacts alone would struggle to convey.’ In this way, digital art can function as a conduit for reframing collections that can be ‘disturbing’ or that require added context to be understood.

Robert Alice, meanwhile, has more futuristic ideas. ‘Do you know what’s the average time we spend in front of an artwork in a museum? It’s about thirty seconds, though I think it’s even less. Our attention spans are getting shorter, especially with stuff that gives you nothing. It’s the museum’s job to get you to look longer.’ He explains how artworks can be linked to the blockchain and coded with algorithms that will update the piece on an ongoing basis, so you could walk past it multiple times a day and it would never be the same, creating a ‘sense of newness’.

Huntrezz Janos, Tinsel Polycarbonate. Image credit: Huntrezz Janos

He continues riffing on this concept, ‘what if there’s a huge LED screen, and let’s say, it’s made of 10 million pixels in an ever-changing artwork. What if I go up to the artwork with my phone and I scan a barcode that says I own a pixel of it? Then maybe that pixel gets highlighted or something unique happens in the piece, almost like it recognises you – how long would you spend looking at that?’

‘Digital art can carry messages that historical works cannot, regarding topics society is grappling with right now. Post- humanism, for example.’

Casey Reas, Process 18 (Software 3). Image credit: Casey Reas

This would change our expectations of artworks, how we engage with them and how they, in turn, react to us. I start to wonder whether this is the slippery slope on which art will slide into entertainment, even gamification. But Alice points out that in museums we’ve always been told what to look at, where to stand, and that we’ll never get closer or own these masterpieces. Yet if we owned a pixel and get to interact with the piece, we are being brought into the fold. It could even be a way of drawing in new audiences and broadening art’s popular appeal to be more in line with cinema or gigs.

‘There’s power in the physical. It’s like a religious pilgrimage going to see a work in person. Digital art is digital, it has a different aura. I call it fast art.’ Alice is clearly someone who inherently understands the possibilities of both and intends to keep experimenting.

At its core, art is supposed to offer us alternate ways of seeing the world, unlocking further dimensions to our lives on Earth. Digital art certainly seems to be ticking those boxes, and museums are slowly beginning to realise it. But despite so much disruption to the traditional way of exhibiting and curating, public collections remain paramount as ‘sites where we share stories with one another and generate new knowledge.’ I can’t help but wonder where the next chapter of this tale might take us.