A French art museum, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Tezos Foundation have joined forces to bring blockchain based art and NFT artists into light with the museum’s collections and exhibitions. The Parisian Museum has the largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world.
Due to the uncertainties surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, it was difficult for museums to draw tourists. Christophe Leribault, a new president, established an internal team to investigate blockchain and NFTs, which were creating excitement in the art world, and to use them to draw new and younger audiences to the Orsay.
The year-long partnership aims to engage the museum’s extensive collections and exhibitions with blockchain technology. Starting on October 3, 2023, the upcoming exhibition “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: The Final Months” will start on October 3, 2023. The exhibition will explore the works created by the famous Dutch painter in the last two months of his life.
Beginning on Tuesday, museum visitors and online collectors will be able to buy two digital mementos connected to the exhibition: one is an augmented reality piece showing van Gogh’s final palette, and the other is an original digital artwork based on Van Gogh that was created by KERU, a French blockchain culture project.
Both will be issued on the Tezos blockchain, and they will have gamified elements that give owners the chance to win prizes like lifetime Orsay passes and invitations to the museum’s opening galas. A total of 2,300 NFTs of each variety will be sold for €20 (roughly $21) each.
Along with these digital projects, d’Orsay and the Tezos Foundation will work together in the upcoming year on some conferences and educational initiatives. The initiative aims to introduce museum visitors to cutting-edge technologies, such as blockchain.
The museum also plans to invite blockchain-using digital artists to create NFT collections that are inspired by its permanent collection of artworks in early 2024.
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