How Museums Can Monetize NFTs
Part 2
In the museum world — as in so many other spheres — the global pandemic and the continuing advance of technology have combined to accelerate change, forcing institutions to adapt, to rethink their future. If museums are to remain both relevant and solvent, they have to evolve fast — and they know it.
NFTs may hold the answer to some museums’ key problems. Museums can upload their works as NFTs and sell them; they can design a royalty system for the sale of NFT works, and collaborate with artists to create new NFT pieces inspired by a museum’s works. The opportunities that NFTs create are almost limitless — or rather they are limited only by museums’ own imagination and creativity. Following on from our recent piece, here are some more ways for museums to monetize NFTs.
Host Public Exhibitions of NFTs
Museums could deploy an NFT as the centerpiece of a public event. This is about to happen for the first time. In November Everydays: The First Five Thousand Days, which sold for $63 million at auction earlier this year, is going on show in New York.
The work will form part of a two-part event called Dreamverse New York. The first part, which takes place in the morning, features an interactive digital gallery of over 150 NFT artists curated by TIME and Metapurse. Visitors will be charged $30 to see it. Beeple’s record-breaking work, the catalyst of the NFT craze, will be showcased at a party in the evening.
But how do you go about exhibiting a work of art that is, by definition, purely digital? Metapurse, the company that bought the work, will show it on a hybrid physical and digital structure that is three stories tall. Guests will literally stare up, open-mouthed, at the 3-dimensional collage with its 5000 separate images.
Tickets for the evening event at Dreamverse start at $475. If that kind of price tags sets the bar, then such events could prove seriously lucrative for museums. They needn’t even build the hi-spec plinth, as Metaverse have done: the existing architecture of a museum could serve as a screen on which the NFT art is displayed.
Imagine an NFT glowing on each of the four sides of IM Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre; or the dozens of NFTs that could be accommodated on the many-faceted exterior of the Vitra Design Museum in Germany.
One can also imagine museums stepping outside the art-world bubble to leverage visibility for themselves and for the digital art market. For example, a museum-made NFT could serve as the theme of an event such as the MET gala, ‘fashion’s biggest night out’.
Displayed in some form on the red carpet, where celebrities could pose alongside, the right work could stand as the inspiration for the evening’s outfits. The publicity would be enormous and invaluable — for the partner museum, for participating artists and collectives, and for the cause of digital art generally.
Collaborate with Companies to Design NFT Collections
Collaborations with artists are just one of the mutually beneficial NFT-based collaborations museums can establish. B2B partnerships are also possible. If a museum were to work jointly on NFTs with a big customer-led firm, both sides could benefit: the museum gets exposure to a new, possibly enormous client base; the commercial enterprise gets to bask in the kudos of a respected cultural organization.
Creative partnerships of this kind are already happening. In 2019, the Louvre teamed up with Airbnb to give one competition winner a private night at the Louvre, complete with a solo viewing of the Mona Lisa.
The winning couple camped out under the glass pyramid — in a translucent tent specially designed to echo the pyramid itself. Over 180,000 entries were submitted, connecting Airbnb with tens of thousands of potential customers and generating global publicity for the museum.
In 2018, the Van Gogh Museum partnered with Vans to debut trainers, hats, and other fashion accessories inspired by the artist’s works. The merchandise drew on eminently recognisable pieces such as Skull, Sunflowers, Almond Blossom and Self-Portrait as a Painter.
It seems the coincidence of the company name with the Dutch preposition ‘van’ was enough to make the collaboration seem like a perfect fit — and in fact it was wildly successful, drawing Van Gogh to the attention of a younger public while earning Vans a solid profit.
Ideas such as these can easily be translated to the digital world. Museums could create contests in which the prize is ownership of a valuable NFT work. In order to enter, participants might be asked to make a purchase at the partner company, and share the contest on social media. Museums might even be able to negotiate a cut of the profit on the qualifying purchase.
Famous NFTs such as Beeple’s $69-million work Everydays: The First Five Thousand Days could serve as the center of a merchandise line similar to the partnership between Vans and the Van Gogh Museum. One-of-a-kind pieces sponsored by a museum would add value to the associated NFTs, while the museum would remain visibly central to the NFT’s provenance long after it has been sold.
Curate NFT-based collections with artists and investors
Digital exhibitions of NFTs could be curated and made the subject of paying exhibitions — in exactly the way that the physical holdings of a museum have always been deployed. And as with physical art shows, museums could look outside of their own collections.
One can envision an online monograph of work by an NFT artist, available viewing for a limited time and with a price of admission — a precise digital analogue of the museum blockbuster show. There would be a huge incidental plus for the organizing museum: the daunting costs of transportation, storage, insurance — these would not even enter into the equation.
Museums could also collaborate with NFT platforms and investors. Justin Sun, Chinese tech entrepreneur and founder of the JUST NFT fund, seeks to register prominent artworks by renowned artists on the blockchain, His platform only accepts blue-chip works valued at over $1 million. A museum could look to a platform such as Sun’s, so as to pool high-quality pieces for digital collections in one place.
An NFT collection could even be the gateway through which museum visitors become acquainted with what could be termed ‘traditional’ digital collections, the online halls and cabinets of the bricks-and-mortar building. It would only take some clever web design to usher visitors of the NFT collection to the digitally available holdings.
Simple statistical analysis would show which collections really grab the attention of the art-loving public. And of course, a proportion of those online viewers will eventually turn up in person, on the doorstep.
A world of opportunity
Museums are the stewards and receptacles of our culture; but that culture is changing. The digital world, with all its assets, is rapidly becoming as important as the tangible one. This is an evolutionary leap that museums should take advantage of. By embracing the potential of NFTs, museums can open up a world of opportunity.
