The brand leader for Yuga Labs, creators of the hugely popular Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT (non-fungible tokens) and, since March 2022, owners of one of the widely collected Larva Labs creations, CryptoPunks— says an exhibition of NFT works that opened at the Center Pompidou in Paris earlier this week signals “at least museums are taking this space seriously.” Noah Davis, who left Christie’s last year for Yuga Labssays museums are starting to “understand the potential of blockchain as a medium and NFTs as a medium to augment what artists can do. So having that validation is definitely important.”
The exhibition at the Beaubourg gallery, NFT: the poetics of the immaterial from certification to blockchain (until January 22, 2024), includes 18 recently acquired blockchain-related works by the National Museum of Modern Art at the Center Pompidou. This acquisition, the first of its kind by a major French public museum, is the result of collaboration between the scientific and administrative teams of the French Ministry of Culture and the director of Pompidou, Xavier Rey.
“[The show] reflects the diversity of artistic cultures inherent in the Web3 landscape linking the digital realm of cryptographic art to the contemporary art trade [and] the specificities of a decentralized economy”, indicates a press release from the Center Pompidou. Other NFT works by artists such as Aaajiao, Emilie Brout and Maxime Marion, Fred Forest and Jill Magid are included.
Jill Magid, Hand Hacked Bouquet 12023, series Offside Flowers © Jill Magid. Courtesy of Center Pompidou, purchase, 2023
Davis helped bring NFTs out of the metaverse and onto the auction house floor with the sale of Beeple’s digital work Daily: first 5,000 days (2021) in March 2021. The sale marked the first time Christie’s accepted cryptocurrency for artwork and the first time a standalone NFT was sold by an auction house. After 353 bids were placed by 33 bidders, some of whom were raising the price in $10 million increments, Every day sold for $60.3 million ($69.3 million with fees).
“We took a strange roundabout way up to this moment in time because of course the Beeple sale…which [sort of event] generally does not precede validation by the museum. So we’re backing off,” Davis says. Beeple’s auction was a “lightbulb moment”, he adds.
“That’s when I realized what NFTs can do, as opposed to what they are. There’s a big gap in that understanding. Nowadays people know what are NFTs. They’re like, ‘Oh, it’s jpegs.’ But they don’t understand that they can also be an immutable public record, that they can hold and communicate information more efficiently than any other technology we’ve ever had, and in a trustless way too.
One of the first things Davis did when he started running the brand was browse the collection and assign punks considered “museum quality” that he wanted to give to institutions. “Founders, I’m really grateful that I got to see the usefulness of this. These are expensive assets that we’re giving away, but they generously accepted,” Davis says.
CryptoPunks were struck in 2017. “There were 10,000. There will never be another CryptoPunk. But we still have over 400 in the Yuga Labs collection,” Davis says. “The intention is to make more donations to important museums.”
Yuga Labs, the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, announced in March last year that they had acquired the intellectual property rights from Larva Labs. CryptoPunks And Meebits collections. They also picked up 423 CryptoPunks and 1,711 Meebits as part of the deal for an undisclosed amount, according to Ocula.
Fred Forest, NFT- Archeology2021 © ADAGP, Paris 2023. © Fred Forest. Courtesy Center Pompidou, gift of the artist, 2023
The NFT sector has had a bumpy ride since the frenzy of 2021. NFT sales volume fell 83% in 2022, according to industry tracker NFT Not fungible, and by the end of last year, about 18 months after the start of the explosion, many markets had fallen or had lost almost all their value.
So where does the sector go from here? “We definitely have some growing pains. That’s how I define it,” Davis says. “But again, I think it all comes down to what the technology does. As [artificial intelligence] becomes more and more powerful, how will we be able to discern the truth? The blockchain solves this problem. Blockchain is a great way to validate the truth. I can imagine a future where there will be NFT-based certificates of authenticity.
There is also the matter of resale right. Last year, we reported that NFTs were meant to secure secondary sales royalties, providing a recurring revenue opportunity that has historically eluded artists in many jurisdictions. NFT artists and watchdog communities like the Immutable X crypto ecosystem, however, have named and shamed royalty-avoiding platforms.
Emilie Brout and Maxime Marion, Nakamoto (The proof)2014-18 Courtesy of the artists and 22.48 m², Paris. © Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion. Photo © Aurelien Mole
“Resale royalties, you can’t apply them on the channel. It’s just not something you can do on a contract level. And human beings being human beings, we are in a hypercapitalist thermodynamic society,” says Davis. “So there will always be an incentive for people to figure out how to pay the least amount of royalties to whoever, whether it’s the market or the artists involved. That being said, even without resale royalties that are enforceable by the blockchain itself, this tool is so important for artists to transparently manage their sourcing, understand who exactly their collectors are, and be able to reach and connect with them.”
Meanwhile, other museums may soon receive a CryptoPunk NFT. “We talk to museums around the world,” Davis says. “There is a large contingent of Britons CryptoPunks and we would like to see a CryptoPunk represented at a major contemporary art institution in the UK. Last year, Yuga Labs also donated the Miami Institute of Contemporary Art CryptoPunk#305a nod to the Miami area code.
- NFT: the poetics of the immaterial from certification to blockchainuntil January 22, 2024, Center Pompidou, Paris
