The famed Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has received a collection of 22 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a gift from a popular pseudonymous crypto Twitter personality, Cozomo de’ Medici.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) announced the acceptance of the NFT gift in a press release on Monday, February 13th. The gift includes the digital artwork of 13 international artists from Brazil, Canada, China, England, Germany, Portugal, and the United States. It is the first and largest collection of artwork minted on blockchain to enter an American museum, LACMA notes.
Expensive NFTs Finds another Home at LACMA
The collection includes some of the expensive NFTs from CryptoPunks, CryptoCubes,D and Art Blocks, a popular platform that features artwork generated by algorithms deployed on a blockchain network. CryptoPunks NFT #3831 was valued at more than $2 million worth of Ether (ETH) in 2021.
Represented in this collection are some of the most sought-after artists in the NFT sphere which includes Justin Aversano, Cai Guo-Qiang, Dmitri Cherniak, Matt DesLauriers, Monica Rizzoli, Han, Yam Karkai, Adam Swaab, Claire Silver, Neil Strauss, Pindar Van Arman, Matt Hall & John Watkinson, Johannes Gees & Kelian Maissen.
According to the collector Cozomo de’Medici, the donation to LACMA includes work spanning from 2017 to 2022 and contains generative art, the first major book on Ethereum blockchain, photography, code, video, and portraits generated with artificial intelligence.
LACMA describes the de’Medici collection as a representative history of the crypto art movement. The donator believes that the latest development will bolster the on-chain art movement. He said:
“My hope is that this donation helps forever cement the on-chain art movement in the canon of art history.
It paves the way for museums everywhere to hold the greatest digital works alongside the greatest physical.
And inspires us all to keep making history together.”
LACMA is the latest major art museum to add NFTs to its collection. It is the largest American museum in the Western United States featuring 149,000 art pieces that illuminate 6,000 years of artistic work.
Although de’Medici is the first major collection, LACMA is not entirely new to NFTs. In addition to the recent collection, the museum has also received an NFT from Tom Sachs’ Rocket Factory, a Chromie Squiggle from artist Erick Calderon, the founder of Art Blocks, and the work of artists Jessica Wembley and Peter Wu.
Both parties referred to the collection as blockchain art instead of NFTs. According to de’Medici, they used consciously not used the word NFT to avoid the stigma attached to it.
Despite the ongoing crypto winter, the NFT boom is still largely intact. The largest NFT marketplace OpeaSea generating more than $5 billion in total trading volume in January 2023 is clear evidence that there is no going back for NFTs.
