Russia’s Hermitage Museum, one of the world’s largest art collection, has sold digital copies of several masterpieces in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFT). The auction, in partnership with cryptocurrency exchange Binance, took place from August 31 to September 7.
A limited series of NFTs were brought out, featuring digital reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna Litta, Giorgione’s Judith, Vincent van Gogh’s Lilac Bush, Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition VI and Claude Monet’s Corner of the Garden at Montgeron.
All the tokenized works were created in two digital copies. One of them was put up for auction on the Binance NFT marketplace, while the other is kept in the Hermitage.
All of the copies were “personally signed by Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, who confirmed the authenticity of each work in the limited series by including the date and precise time of signing, thereby giving it absolute uniqueness, perpetuated in the blockchain,” the museum stated.
“The place of signing – the halls of the Hermitage – is also preserved in the metadata.”
Auction prices were set in BUSD, a cryptocurrency that tracks the US dollar, with each digital item starting at 10,000 BUSD (equivalent to $10,000). The auction brought in nearly $440,000, including $150,000 for Madonna Litta. All the proceeds went to the museum.
Through this auction, the museum had “no mercantile expectations,” however, according to Piotrovsky. “We want to see how this form [NFTs] is received. The NFT is a philosophy, the aesthetic of possession. Digital copies of works of art fill the Internet, where in effect everyone has access to them, but an NFT gives a sense of ownership, and in our case a sense of involvement with a great museum,” he stated.
