New York’s Museum of Modern Art considers buying NFTs

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is considering buying NFTs with some of the proceeds of an auction of William S. Paley’s art collection. MoMA has formed a team that monitors the digital art market and will consider purchasing NFTs.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, the museum plans to sell $70 million worth of the collection gathered by the founder of the CBS broadcasting network, which it has been holding since he died in 1990, the Journal said. The collection includes Pablo Picasso’s 1919 “Guitar on a Table” as well as works by Renoir and Rodin. Sotheby’s will auction off 29 of Paley’s 81 pieces at MoMA by the end of 2022.

Glenn Lowry, the MoMA’s director, revealed the intention is to extend the digital reach of the museum after attendances slumped during and after the pandemic. In her words, the museum has a team of people looking into the digital art market, and it is considering purchasing digital art connected to non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

In-person NFT galleries have been popping up since the asset class rose in popularity last year. In May, SuperRare debuted its first gallery in SoHo, New York. NFTs are a specific type of crypto asset that allows holders to prove their ownership of real or digital items – generally, the latter.

Earlier, Damien Hirst, the prominent British contemporary artist, said that NFTs are changing the world. Speaking with Cointelegraph in an exclusive interview, he compared NFTs to “the invention of paper.”

This May, Dubai’s Museum of the Future, a new futuristic Emirati museum, has teamed up with leading crypto exchange Binance to cultivate and present a collection of NFTs. Celebrating International Museum Day, the museum, deemed the world’s most beautiful and futuristic building, introduced a brand-new concept that talks about the possibilities of the future.

Also, in August 2021, Binance NFT, the NFT platform of the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance, and Russia’s State Hermitage Museum announced their collaboration in the release of tokenized art from the museum collection, which was auctioned on the NFTs marketplace.