The Opéra de Paris’s Emergence into Web3
In our latest WAC Weekly session, we were joined by Eric Grebille from the Opéra de Paris, Pierre Fautrel from the artist collective OBVIOUS, and Henri Jouhad from the digital innovation consultancy Polyconseil to talk about the Opéra house’s first NFT project, and what they learned about NFTs as a tool for crowdfunding or “crowd patronage”.
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The Emergence NFT drop
For over 350 years, the Opéra de Paris has worked to bring opera and ballet to the widest audience possible. With their first NFT drop, Emergence, an algorithmic ballet, they’re experimenting with web3 as a tool for audience engagement and maybe, one day, crowd patronage.
Each piece in the collection is a unique looping video created by artists from the OBVIOUS collective, based on the same piece of footage of one of the Opéra’s dancers in motion. Pieces vary on the dance included, the music, and the colors and background elements based on the four seasons.
The Opéra de Paris ran this project on their own bespoke software platform, built in collaboration with Polyconseil and consulting with the French Ministry of Culture. In their own words, “buying an NFT from the Opéra de Paris is supporting the world of culture in general, and joining the NFT for good movement. This allows these digital assets to go beyond the world of finance and have tangible beneficial effects in the real world. The first collection of the Opéra de Paris in the world of NFTs aims to support artistic and digital creation.”
Eric Grebille, from the Opéra’s sponsorship and patronage team, saw the enthusiastic audience around NFTs and started to wonder if this might be a source of crowdfunding in future as the technology develops. But the environment around NFTs moves so fast, and has ongoing regulatory issues, that it’s hard for deliberate, responsible, slow-moving institutions to figure out how they might want to respond to it. When he met Henri Jouhad from Polyconseil, he knew the Opéra de Paris had a partner who could help with the technology. When he was introduced to OBVIOUS’s work with other institutions, he says, “it was love at first sight”. He knew he wanted to do some original work with OBVIOUS, rather than reproduce something the Opéra de Paris had already, and was willing to launch it as an experiment and see what would happen.
Speaking on their previous work with institutions like Hermitage Museum, Pierre Fautrel talked about how he and his collaborators “believe that sometimes the web3 community wants to reconstruct the world from ashes … and we don’t believe in that vision. We think that we can merge the two worlds by making people from this web3 community and from the digital art community meet the traditional institution.” He discussed how he’d come to appreciate the creativity that can come from working with the constraints big institutions often face, and reflected on how it’s ultimately the way for independent artists to do big, impactful work. On OBVIOUS’s work more broadly, he says that “our vision is to be NFT artists, and also traditional artists”, that’s why their shows include new work by painters and sculptors: “we like highlight that traditional craftsmanship can help to showcase new technology.”
Getting this work in front of their target audience — bridging a gap between existing membership and a crypto audience — required some bespoke software. One key requirement was that collectors had to be able to purchase the NFTs with credit cards as well as cryptocurrency. While a wallet is necessary to hold the NFT, there’s no reason the seller can’t create a “custodial” wallet for someone paying with a credit card to use for themselves later.
Jouhad was able to share some statistics that had come out of the sale. The buyers surveyed were 3/4s French (mostly US and UK otherwise), 50% over 35 years old, and over 90% male. More than 20% of the buyers were purchasing an NFT for the first time, a stat they were particularly happy with.
How did patrons and audiences react?
In the wake of 2021’s hype bubble and 2022’s various troubles, lots of people at agencies working with brands and institutions are hesitant about NFT. But the Opéra didn’t see any negative reactions from their existing patrons and stakeholders around this project. Grebille tells us existing patrons weren’t ready to get involved in this first experimental venture, but they’ve been impressed with this project and are more willing to join in on a future sale.
The Opéra knew they had to be careful in some respects with this project, which is why they wanted every aspect to be as safe, premium, and well-established as possible. OBVIOUS was chosen in part because of their previous work with big institutions. The work was wholly original to avoid any copyright concerns. And the Opéra worked with legal counsel and France’s Ministry of Culture to make sure everything was above-board, considering that the relevant rules are very strict in some places and still untested in others.
Why Ethereum?
An emphasis on everything being well-established is why the Opéra chose to run this on Ethereum. Ethereum is more expensive to buy and sell on than other blockchains, with transaction fees remaining high because of network congestion.
Jouhad tells us “if this collection had dropped a year ago, it would have been on Tezos”. Tezos’s low transaction fees make projects much more financially accessible than other chains, and over time its community has become more focussed on art projects than any other. A year ago Ethereum was still running on the proof-of-work consensus mechanism, whose environmental impact was a deal-breaker for many institutions. Grebille confirms that this only happened on Ethereum because of The Merge, which reduced the blockchain’s energy use by around 99.9% overnight.
Now that Ethereum’s energy use isn’t so high, it remains the most well-known and recognizable chain after Bitcoin. While that made Ethereum the correct choice for this project, the Opéra’s custom platform has been built to mint on other chains like Tezos, Polygon, or whatever is deemed appropriate for future projects.
Did it drive membership? Attract new audiences?
The Opéra’s patronage team is primarily interested in NFTs as a mechanism for crowdfunding in the long-term. In the short term, these are 300 NFT holders compared to the 800,000 people who visit the Opéra de Paris each year; Emergence is just an experiment to see who would show up, and a bit of a marketing project. Did it drive any new membership? Attract younger audiences?
Grebille says they haven’t analyzed all the results yet, but there are some encouraging signs. While they haven’t seen many conversions from NFT holders into their main audience, feedback from their Discord server suggests that many collectors are more interested in finding out more about the Opéra and seeing a show than they were before.
Just talking to people on Discord has been an interesting experience for Grebille and the team. They’re very comfortable with social platforms like Instagram and Facebook, but the many-to-many communication on Discord was a totally new experience. And just a few weeks ago the Opéra launched a new streaming platform to broadcast recordings and live performances to members. It’s clear the Opéra is trying out new ways to engage its membership on digital channels and reach out to new audiences.
What does this mean for the future?
Emergence was a short one-off project partly because it was an experiment. But the Opéra also had to be very clear that ownership of this NFT included no long-term membership or material benefits of any kind. (Any benefits were tied to the initial purchase of a token at auction, not the ownership of the token itself. So, benefits do not travel with the NFT.) France’s laws around crypto and arts patronage create a tricky intersection: patronage is tax deductible, crypto tokens cannot be.
Navigating this requires a lot of care, but Grebille is happy to go there. “I’m really curious and eager to learn about ‘real’ crowdfunding experience using NFTs, because that’s really something that we’d want to do in the future. But I think that we have a lot of steps to go through to educate our audience. … For the moment [the NFTs are] only to collect and to resell.”
Elsewhere, we learn, the Chicago Symphony has considered using crowdfunding as an engagement tool for a 21–40-year-old professional audience. The reason this is being talked about is that this demographic has less disposable income than previous generations. In the USA, where orchestras and operas are in large part funded by their patrons, crowdfunding could help raise funds from an audience who wants to contribute and feel involved, but can’t afford to donate six-figure gifts to the institutions whose work they enjoy.
For the symphony it’s less about the amount of money raised, and more about cultivating a more engaged audience who are more likely to attend more frequently. With only 10% of the pieces having been listed on the secondary market, it’s an encouraging sign that NFTs might be a way for institutions to cultivate a sense of ownership and deeper engagement from audiences old and new.
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.
