How the Whitney Museum is Bringing NFTs into New Media Art History
In our latest WAC Weekly session Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum, talked to us about the work she’s doing within the Whitney between digital art and NFTs. We saw some of the continuities between the history of digital art and the kinds of works minted on-chain, as well as some of the differences and challenges institutions face working with these technologies.
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How the Whitney collects NFTs and digital art
In the early days of the NFT hype crypto entrepreneurs were pitching Paul and other curators NFTs by artists in their collection, but so many of them misunderstood the reasons a museum might acquire one. Since they don’t participate in the market directly, they have no financial incentive to speculate on an NFT’s value. The only reason they would collect is if the NFT were critical to a work they’d decided was of art-historical value.
In the US those acquisitions are commonly made by an acquisition committee focused on a particular area, made up of people supporting the arts or museum members and led by a curator with expertise in that field. Over 2–4 meetings a year the committee meets to see works presented by the curator, then votes on a selection of those pieces to enter the permanent collection.
Christiane Paul leads the “youngest” acquisition committee at the Whitney, formed in 2017 to focus on digital art. With a remit to collect art that explores technology as a medium — engaging with the social and political impact of those technologies — their immediate priority was to fill in gaps in the collection.
The Whitney had digital works from artists like Cory Arcangel, Ian Cheng, and John F. Simon Jr. in the collection, but she says those entered the collection
rather haphazardly through different kinds of committees. So I wanted to fill in gaps from the 60s — works by the algorists who created groundbreaking generative works that were mostly prints on paper; the 1980s to 2000s — key works of software art, digital cinema, network installations; and then the whole post-digital and current era in which artists engage with the language of the digital across different materialities. All museums usually have a mission for their collection. And what I’m considering is within this framework. So we would not just jump on any NFT that comes along. But the question always is: Why? Does that acquisition make sense? How does it tell the story of the art we have in the collection?
The first NFT that entered the Whitney’s collection was a gift of Eve Sussman’s 89 Seconds Atomized, an experiment in “shared guardianship” based on her film 89 Seconds at Alcázar. The original video piece from 2004 is in the Whitney collection already, so it was a natural choice for their first NFT.
These NFTs are transferred to a hot wallet and then immediately stored in a cold/hardware wallet, which is one whose public key has never “touched” the public internet; the wallet can only be used to initiate or sign transactions when the owner plugs it into a computer with the right software. Additionally, they are planning to use a Ledger Crypto-Steel Capsule for storing the private seed phrase. As we covered in a previous session, it’s important to keep your NFTs in a “cold” wallet just for storage, but an institution will inevitably have more complex needs than the average crypto user.
For instance, Ian Cheng’s work 3FACE is updated periodically, so someone at the Whitney needs to transfer the NFT to a hot wallet to update the work by interacting with the blockchain. As we saw in a previous session in preserving on-chain art, this kind of interaction with a blockchain is something museums will have to consider when collecting NFTs for the long-term. (e.g. Do they have the resources to their own fork of the blockchain in perpetuity?)
Many DAOs will protect their NFTs and crypto holdings with a multi-signature wallet, requiring several members to sign off on any transactions. This prevents theft or loss due to one person’s error. While the Whitney will likely follow the same model it is a challenge to have to decide who has what level of access, which departments are responsible for the wallet, how permissions might be granted and revoked. Paul says “those are the banal, but ultimately trickiest institutional questions that one faces and we’re trying to stick pretty much within the general framework we’ve already created.”
Institutional hurdles to web3 adoption
Over the WAC sessions we’ve seen time and time again that institutions young and old, big and small, are interested in web3 technologies. But there are several hurdles to be overcome at the institutional level before these tools can be employed.
Among these, Paul tells us, is that the NFT space is still so self-contained. Mainstream blockchains and NFT standards weren’t built with the art world in mind. The existing frameworks and operational structures museums work in would take time to adapt to these technologies. One answer is that the art world can build its own platforms and tools like Arcual, but these platforms take years to develop and institutions have immediate needs.
One potential use of NFTs in the art world is putting all the details of provenance, conservation, and other metadata together in one package. Keeping it all in one place would be convenient, but doing so on a public blockchain could enable more open access and collaboration between institutions and researchers.
As it stands, the metadata that comes with an NFT on Ethereum is nowhere near what the Whitney asks for in its conservation questionnaire used when acquiring new works. Whenever they collect the NFT for an art piece, they still have to get in touch with the artist and ask for everything they need.
Once they have all this information, it’s stored in a proprietary database that’s private to the Whitney. (It includes over 26,000 works in their online collection.) This idea of a shared metadata platform has been a dream since the 1990s, but one that’s never materialised. With blockchains and NFTs Paul thinks there’s definitely a chance of building something like that, due to their inherently open nature, but she thinks there are still significant challenges on the institutions’ side.
Another issue is education. While there’s a lot of interest around this, there still isn’t the kind of expert-level documentation you might find for time-based media conservation. Part of that is figuring out how NFTs fit into the permanent collection, which we’ve discussed previously with Tina Rivers Ryan from the Buffalo AKG museum.
Using the collection as an online presence
As the Whitney builds up a collection of NFTs in its wallet, it’s building up an art collection that’s totally visible to the public. If a private collector advertises their crypto wallet, maybe using the Ethereum Name Service to get a public “username.eth” address, it’s easy to look at their NFT collection and find new projects you might be interested in. Some platforms like tender.art on Tezos are building out a more user-friendly version of this where users can put their collections on display.
Since the Whitney’s crypto wallet isn’t for selling or trading the NFTs, what is it for? Paul would like to see more use of the wallet as a way to display works online, but it’s not the only channel the Whitney has for online collection and community-building. They have the resources to run their online collection, a dedicated online resource for researchers and audiences who want to find out a lot more about the works in the permanent collection. When and if the NFTs are acquired in the permanent collection, not just a wallet owned by the museum, they can be featured on whitney.org along with the rest of the collection.
The future of web3 in digital art
Asked about her thoughts on the future of blockchain, NFTs, and digital art, Christiane Paul is optimistic.
She was expecting the hype bubble to burst, and having seen it happen she thinks the technologies are all here to stay. The NFT market crash might be great for NFT art. Now that nobody is chasing fast money, artists coming into the space are more interested in the technology and the social scene that was obscured by the headlines.
That social scene was something she wanted to reflect in Chain Reaction, the show she curated for Feral File. While exploring the idea of on-chain interactions causing real-world actions, the show touches on the environmental causes that have been important to artists in this space. Reflecting on that transition she says “in 2021, the art world was really riding the coattails of crypto entrepreneurs. Which is bad. It should be the other way around. But personally I think there are a lot of exciting possibilities to explore in the future.”
WAC Weekly is part of WAC Lab, a new program unleashing the full potential of Web3 for the arts and culture produced by We Are Museums in collaboration with TZ Connect and Blockchain Art Directory, and powered by the Tezos ecosystem.
