A museum entirely dedicated to NFTs opens its doors in Seattle
Eva Deschamps / February 2, 2022
A museum devoted entirely to NFTs, certified digital works that are all the rage on the art market, has opened in Seattle, a northwestern U.S. city known for its artistic dynamism.
Seattle's NFT Museum features original works with explanations of the technologies that make them possible. It is designed to help visitors navigate the new world of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), digital objects whose ownership is traceable.
The interest of having a physical place is to facilitate access to all, says to AFP the co-founder of the museum, Peter Hamilton.
You can walk in and it doesn't matter what you know or don't know about digital art, NFTs, because you can see the works presented in a large format, in a way that reminds you of an exhibition in a museum, he says.
NFTs are certificates of authenticity associated with a virtual object that they make unique.
Even if their content can be copied, the NFT itself always remains the original, in the same way that there are countless reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, but the original painting always hangs in the Louvre.
Almost unknown a year ago, they represent for some the new golden goose of the contemporary art market.
Investors and wealthy collectors have rushed to acquire these virtual objects, whose ownership is traceable through the same blockchain technology (blockchain) used for bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.
NFTs have become staple lots at major auction houses, such as Christie's, which sold a digital work by artist Beeple for a record $69.3 million in New York in March 2021.