The world’s most famous digital NFT tokens will become museum exhibits for the first time

The French National Museum of Modern Art (Musée national d’Art moderne) has announced plans to hold a new exhibition dedicated to the relationship between traditional art and blockchain. According to preliminary data, the exhibition will feature NFT projects CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs, as well as works by 12 other digital artists.

Le Centre Pompidou fait l’acquisition d’un ensemble d'œuvres traitant des relations entre blockchain et création artistique, dont ses premiers NFT ! 👾
Ce sont 18 projets de 13 artistes français et internationaux qui entrent en collection.
Plus d'infos 👉 https://t.co/PXL4O2E9vh pic.twitter.com/sNI7EYtK5E

— Centre Pompidou (@CentrePompidou) February 10, 2023

The museum displays about 65,000 pieces of contemporary art, including masterpieces by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Oleksa Hryshchenko. "Partnering with the Pompidou Center, one of the most iconic contemporary art museums in the world, means that the industry is rightly recognizing CryptoPunks as an important art movement," the authors of the CryptoPunks NFT collection emphasized.

We are honored to announce that Autoglyph #25 (donated by us), and Cryptopunk #110 (generously donated by our friends at @yugalabs) have been acquired by @CentrePompidou for their permanent collection. pic.twitter.com/q8URwLHbTR

— Larva Labs (@larvalabs) February 10, 2023

As for CryptoPunks, it is one of the most popular collections of non-fungible tokens. It consists of 10,000 NFTs issued in 2017 on the Ethereum blockchain. The collection was created by Larva Labs, a company founded by Matthew Hall and John Watkins. Initially, the authors of the NFT project were working on a program for the automatic generation of avatars. However, in the summer of 2017, they spontaneously decided to use it to create digital objects on the blockchain.