Five Web3 Museum Fundraising Projects Reviewed
In our latest WAC Weekly session we talked about museum fundraising and web3.
Fundraising is a crucial activity for museums of all kinds, and with so many different kinds of institutions — private, non-profit, government-funded, patron-funded, etc. — there are many ways museums can do it.
In recent years we’ve seen museums experiment with NFTs as a fundraising mechanism on top of existing methods like gifts, charity auctions, and crowdfunding.
These use-cases aren’t new in themselves, but for museums they’ve largely been seen as a way to enhance their fundraising efforts while reaching out to a new, younger audience.
For this session, we introduced a new format for the season. Attendees split up into one of five breakout rooms to discuss one project in detail, with the following questions as a prompt:
- What’s the most inspiring part of the project?
- What’s the main area of improvement for the project?
- What if this project didn’t use the blockchain at all?
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LACMA: Ringers #962
In 2021, Dmitri Cherniak released his generative art series Ringers, colorful, abstract pieces based on procedural rules exploring how a piece of string could be wrapped around a set of pegs in any given position.
In Ringers #962: The LACMA Iterations, Cherniak brings a new iteration of that idea to a physical print edition. A print of the Ringers #962 NFT, donated to LACMA in early 2023, sits in the center of a 3x3 grid of generative pieces, with each print being signed and dated by Cherniak himself.
Each print shipped with an NFT of the work, with the number of NFTs based on how many pieces were ordered in the 24 hour purchase window.
In total, the project raised over $600,000 for LACMA’s operating budget, with the sale creating hype and exclusivity by the 24-hour event rather than a limited number of editions.
It takes that idea from NFT drops which themselves borrowed tactics from sneaker drops that have people queuing around blocks, but the group thought it was one of many projects that just use the NFT as a certificate. They didn’t see the kind of community aspect that can come from something as minor as a Discord server connecting the holders, or something that involves the community in the work like Eve Sussman’s 89 Seconds Atomized.
Jackson Pollock Studio: Beyond The Edge
One of the most significant artifacts owned by the Jackson Pollock Estate is his studio floor. It’s covered in the same swirls of paint that we see on his famous “drip paintings”, and this piece of art history was inadvertently preserved in 1953 when the floor was tiled over.
In partnership with the NFT platform Iconic, the Jackson Pollock Studio, part of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, launched Beyond The Edge, an NFT collection recording sections of the paint-splattered studio floor. Each of the four NFTs was sold in editions of 100 each, and each sale included a hand-numbered, museum-quality print of the image.
Selling at 0.8 ETH (or, around $1,600 USD) each, the sale raised over $500,000 for Jackson Pollock Studio, which is going towards stewarding the studio itself and funding the Jackson Pollock estate in general.
During the group’s discussion they raised the point of whether the NFT was necessary at all. Once the collector has acquired the physical work, is there any reason to hold on to the NFT? If it’s a physical piece, there’s no confusing the NFT for the art itself, so perhaps the NFT can better serve its use as a certificate of authenticity: if the owner wants to sell their print at some point, their proving ownership of the wallet that holds the piece’s NFT can help establish provenance on a secondary market and could be passed onto the next owner as part of the deal.
Opéra de Paris: Emergence, an algorithmic ballet
In March 2023 the Opéra de Paris launched its first NFT collection: Emergence, an algorithmic ballet. We spoke to the team behind the project ahead of their launch last season to find out more about how the opera house was feeling about the process ahead of launch.
Made in collaboration with the generative art collective OBVIOUS, the pieces combined video of the opera house’s ballet dancers with many seasonal AI-generated overlays.
The project was launched as an experiment in crowdfunding renovations to the 148-year-old building itself, with NFTs conferring membership benefits and exclusive offers from the opera.
Dropping in March 2023 when generative art was hitting the mainstream, the total sales volume for the collection was 14 ETH, which works out to around $28,300 USD. It’s a respectable sale but not one that’s going to fund massive, long-term renovations.
As we discussed with the team, the opera also set up a Discord server as a gathering place for the NFT holders; this served a marketing purpose before the project launch and can be used afterwards to keep in touch with the buyers in a new way: more many-to-many than the one-to-many broadcast they’re used to on other platforms like Instagram or X.
Two successes of the project were the utility of the NFTs and the quality of the artworks associated with them.
The group raised the question of whether there was a conflict here: here and in similar projects there’s a high expectation of useful utility and ongoing value associated with the NFT, so unlike a regular sale of digital art via an NFT, there aren’t many buyers appreciating the art on its own terms. While NFTs do present an opportunity for museums to do something much more visually interesting than a regular membership touchpoint, the idea that NFTs must confer some kind of utility beyond supporting the creator could be a bad precedent to set.
Musée d’Orsay: Van Gogh Digital Souvenirs
One project to come out of WAC Lab’s second season was the Musée d’Orsay’s digital souvenir project accompanying their exhibition Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: The Final Months. We discussed this project in detail in our first session of the season, and we followed its development as one of the WAC Factory projects in our handbook Museums Tech: 10 Blockchain Stories.
With one of the souvenirs being available at €8,90 and the other at €20, this is an unusually affordable NFT edition owing to its positioning as the kind of thing visitors would buy in the gift shop.
While this isn’t going to be a significant boost to the museum’s fundraising effort it does do two interesting things that could increase revenue in the future.
For one, it redefines the souvenir from a static object to an active, ongoing experience. Visitors buying an object from the gift shop would usually be the end of their relationship with the museum, but the NFTs’ in-store discounts, exclusive invitations, and other benefits to be announced creates an incentive to come back and spend more. And these ongoing membership-style benefits create a new point on a spectrum between a visitor who only comes in once every couple of years and the highly engaged member who comes to events and might be a patron of the museum.
Much of this project could be done without blockchain, but the benefit here is that everything can happen in one seamless experience.
All the purchase and post-purchase experiences can be provided by the museum’s partner Keru, and there’s little platform risk because the record of who owns which NFTs (and its associated benefits) exists on the Tezos blockchain. If the museum wanted to build other programs on top of this on-chain data, they wouldn’t have to ask to get the data from one partner or platform.
Cure Alzheimer Fund: reGEN — Generative Artists Fighting Degenerative Diseases
This project was a digital art auction held by ArtBlocks and RightClickSave to support the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund in its research to slow down, prevent, or reverse the effects of the disease.
Working with five leading artists in the generative art space, they raised over $500,000 for Alzheimer’s research between five days between October 23rd and October 27th, with each day focusing on one artist.
One aspect of NFTs that gets discussed a lot in the context of fundraising is secondary sales.
In theory, every secondary sale of an NFT can direct a portion of its revenue to a crypto wallet of the creator’s choosing. In most cases that’s the artist themselves, but in a charitable context it could be a nonprofit that may or may not have had anything to do with the creation of the project.
This is true, but it’s enabled by the smart contracts running NFT marketplaces and not the NFT standard itself. This means there are plenty of “backdoor” mechanisms by which to sell an NFT while paying 0% royalties, as we examined in detail last season.
While platforms like fx(hash) can enforce royalties on secondary sales by making all sales “phone home” to one smart contract, that’s just one marketplace operating as part of an integrated generative art platform.
As a general rule, institutions should focus on primary sales as their fundraising mechanism rather than trying to manufacture a secondary market that likely won’t pay dividends.
Where’s the value in web3 fundraising?
Across these five NFT projects we see a range of approaches to fundraising, from something like a traditional auction, to something like a traditional NFT drop with good community engagement, to digital souvenirs that forego talking about the technology in favor of what’s actually valuable to their audience.
Whether those NFTs will hold long-term value is an open question: with the market being at a recent low compared to 2020–2022 it’s not a high bar to clear, but as we’ve discussed here and in previous sessions the secondary market potential for NFTs isn’t a reliable source of income for creators or institutions.
There’s potentially more value in some of these projects than just the sell price of the tokens. As one attendee pointed out, it’s worth contrasting some of these smarter projects with “not so deep” attempts to, say, fractionalize ownership of a digital replica of a painting and call it a day. Museums have a lot of room to decide what’s valuable to them: is it the local visitor who comes regularly for new events? Is it the membership paying annual fees? Is it the fundraiser that happens once or twice a year?
As he continued, a museum is a big and complex institution and in most cases visitors only ever see the “tip of the iceberg”, there are so many resources and experiences museums could activate with web3; fundraising with tools like NFTs doesn’t have to mean attempting to financialize the kinds of assets and experiences people are already used to.
WAC Weekly is part of WAC Lab, a program unleashing the full potential of web3 for the arts and culture produced by We Are Museums in collaboration with LAL Art, and powered by Tezos.
