Web3 is Not Dead with Musée d’Orsay
Welcome back to WAC Weekly! Over the next 25 episodes, we’re talking to professionals across the museum and web3 sectors to talk about the opportunities and challenges of unlocking web3 for the arts and culture sector.
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In our last season, we ended with WAC Factory, where participants from 12 institutions worked with our mentors and tech integrators to prototype real projects that could serve their institutions’ goals. In this first session of our third season, we talked to one of our WAC Lab fellows: Constance de Marliave, the international developments and projects manager at the Musée d’Orsay.
During WAC Factory, Constance and her team worked with web3 startup Keru to prototype an NFT-based “digital souvenir” for visitors to take home from their new exhibition Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: The Final Months. Having launched in October, how is it going? What worked, and what challenges have they faced along the way?
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Why did Musée d’Orsay want to explore Web3?
Musée d’Orsay’s journey towards web3 began with WAC Weekly, but what drew the team to the technology in the first place?
Having conducted market research, the Musée d’Orsay team found that there’s a perception of the museum as a stuffy, academic, traditional institution with a focus on the 19th century. What they are is a forward-thinking team with a mission to democratize the cultural heritage they protect, which is why they’re exploring more digital technologies like VR and blockchain.
Having seen institutions like the British Museum launch NFT projects in 2021, they had to determine whether or not web3 tools had any relevance to their mission.
France’s Ministry of Culture has been thinking along similar lines and has given the green light for museums to experiment with the technology and share their findings. This aligned with WAC’s emphasis on practical prototypes and knowledge sharing, which is why the team decided to take action and join the fellowship rather than watching from the sidelines and ponder what all of this might mean for them.
What is the Van Gogh digital souvenir?
The appeal of starting with the digital souvenir was twofold.
For the museum, it was a relatively simple NFT project that was achievable between their small team and the young startup Keru. And when they’re talking to visitors, it’s easy to “sell” the project as a digital version of a form factor they’re already used to.
The souvenir can only be bought from a webpage on the Keru site, but it’s explained to visitors in the gift shop where they might be looking to buy something. Visitors can also take home a small promotional “postcard” with a QR code, which will enable them to go to the site and find out more about the project in their own time once they’re at home.
The museum offers two NFTs that tie in with the Van Gogh exhibition. Both are “open editions”: when a visitor buys one they’re minting their own unique instance of it on the blockchain, and there’s no limit on how many of these editions can be minted.
One is a 3D scan of one of the last palettes Van Gogh used in the 1890s. This unlocks two benefits for buyers: a 15% discount at the museum’s gift shop, and an early-access look at upcoming web3 projects the museum plans to launch next year and in the future. This costs €8,90 (around $9.50 USD). It’s a roughly 20-second process to buy, with an easy option to buy with credit card; visitors who have never used crypto before don’t need to worry about buying cryptocurrency, wallet security, or transaction fees.
The other option is a view of the Musée d’Orsay in the style of Van Gogh’s La Nuit étoilée, which is itself housed in the museum. This souvenir costs €20,00 (around $21 USD) and on top of the benefits mentioned above gets buyers a discount on entrance for their next visit. In addition, some editions of the souvenir will come with a “golden ticket” benefit, randomly assigned to buyers along with their NFT.
All the golden tickets come with a free meal for two at the Musée d’Orsay restaurant. 40 editions of the ticket come with free access to one of the next exhibitions at the museum. 20 lots come with an invitation to one of the museum’s next opening events. And 5 of the golden tickets come with free, lifetime access to the museum for two.
These benefits are typical of the kind we see in other NFT projects where the benefit might be open to all holders of a much more expensive token. With this “golden ticket” prize draw system, the museum can experiment with offering these kinds of benefits to visitors while keeping the price affordable.
With the average purchase value in the gift shop being around €15, the tokens are well within the range visitors would be happy to pay. Since the point of the project was to experiment with web3 and be seen to be doing something innovative, there was an open question around whether they should just give the souvenirs out for free.
One unique feature of a digital souvenir is that in principle it costs nothing to manufacture; if it’s on-chain visitors can really own it, which will only incur a small minting fee on the museum or the buyer depending on the blockchain used. But in working with an early-stage startup like Keru, they decided to price the tokens in such a way that it was sustainable for their partner on this project. In upcoming web3 projects the team would like to lower that barrier to entry so that visitors are free to try it out at no cost.
The opportunities and challenges
Outside of this project, one opportunity the museum sees in web3 is creating new kinds of “customer” at various points on a spectrum between the visitor who comes in once or twice a year, paying just the entry fee, and the patron who is deeply engaged and is able to help fund new projects.
Benefits like invitations to openings and lifetime access are the kinds of benefits that these most engaged patrons have, and a version of those ongoing benefits might be open to members who pay a small annual fee. While there’s nothing stopping them doing this with Web 2.0 technologies like standard payment rails, subscription management platforms, email lists, CRM solutions, etc. Web3 tools like blockchain, NFTs, POAPs, etc. offer an intuitive form factor that bundles much of this together onto one system, making it easier to blur the lines between these kinds of stakeholder. The museum doesn’t run an online community space like a Discord, but if they wanted to they could invite souvenir holders and create a community that was more engaging and participatory for end-users than a mailing list with updates about upcoming events.
One initial obstacle to this project was onboarding internally. As we explore in our upcoming WAC Handbook, a museum can be a big bureaucracy and it’s hard to educate a whole organization like this.
During the WAC Fellowship, Constance was making summary notes of her findings and thoughts on the material and was mailing this out to interested parties across the organization; this kept people informed without much commitment on their part, or wrangling everyone’s schedules to get them in a presentation.
One thing she wishes they had time to do before the project launch was to run practical testing sessions where anyone in the organization could get their hands on a prototype version of the final project. Not only would this make it easier to explain the project and get buy-in from other teams, it would also highlight potential issues with the software or hardware that only come up in real user testing.
There was also a regulatory challenge with this project. Despite the supportive environment the Ministry of Culture is creating, the Musée d’Orsay has strict regulations it has to follow given its status as a public body. One of these is that the museum can’t handle cryptocurrencies directly; this causes issues for web3 projects in French museums that we discussed in detail in our last season. Since the museum can’t handle a crypto wallet, they left in the position of relying on a partner like Keru to handle much of the operation.
Going forward with Web3
While the digital souvenir project offers something new for visitors, much of its success is in abstracting away some of the crypto UX in favor of processes and technologies that everyone is familiar with. Constance is the first to point out that for the museum’s first web3 project, it’s outwardly not very “web3”.
The team is interested in going further into the web3 arts space with a more ambitious project next year, working with the Tezos Foundation. While many of the details are still to be decided, this project will expose more of the technology to visitors and get them thinking about it and interacting with it. For now, the digital souvenir project has given the museum team and visitors alike an easy entry point into web3, and it’s given the team a way to road-test the way they might run these projects and communicate them to visitors in the next year.
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.
