The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is the latest major art museum to be added NFT piece of art to its collection, announcing today that it has acquired a series of remarkable and valuable NFT coins through donations from notable collectors.
LACMA has accepted a donation of 22 tokenized digital artworks of the pseudonym Cosimo de’ Medici, a well-known Crypto Twitter personality. The collection includes CryptoPunks NFT #3831, which was last sold for $2.1M worth of ETH in 2021.
It also offers NFTs from Art blocks, a popular platform that features artwork generated by algorithms deployed on a blockchain network. Art Blocks works from Dmitri Cherniak’s “Ringers” and Monica Rizzolli’s “Fragments of an Infinite Field” projects are included in the set.
Other notable creators whose NFT art has been donated to LACMA in the set include famous photographer Justin Aversano, women’s world artist and creator Yam Karkai, and Claire Silver and Pindar Van Arman, both known for using AI as a tool for generating NFT artwork.
LACMA described the donation of de’ Medici, a collector who has been linked to rapper Snoop Dogg, also a major player in the world of Web3– as the largest collection of blockchain artworks acquired to date by a US art museum.
Interestingly, the LACMA announcement avoids prominent use of the term “NFT,” which stands for non-fungible token. The acronym is stigmatized among some Web3 skeptics and the general public, and some brands have chosen to avoid it. The online discussion platform Reddit, for example, calls its NFTs “Collectible avatars”.
In an interview with ArtNews, de’ Medici said he and LACMA intentionally chose to call it “blockchain art” or “chain art” (or similar) to avoid the controversial NFT tag. “The term NFT is stigmatized, so we’ve moved away from it,” he told the publication.
LACMA is the latest major art museum to add NFTs to its collection. Friday, Center Pompidou in Paris announced donations of a CryptoPunk and an Autoglyphs NFT, which were provided by Yuga Labs and Larva Labs respectively. Yuga too donate a CryptoPunk at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami last November.
In addition to the collection described above, LACMA has also acquired a number of other donated NFTs, including a Chromie Squiggle by artist Erick “Snowfro” Calderon, the founder of Art Blocks, as well as an NFT of Tom Sachs rocket factory. calderon said ArtNews that his given NFT will be the last Chromie Squiggle minted in the 10,000 coin collection.
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