New York MoMA now has tokenized artworks in its permanent collection
The museum’s acquisition of two NFTs marked its first on-chain and AI holdings. Generative art is proving Web3’s creative anchor in the traditional art world. Last month, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) made headlines by acquiring Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised — Machine Hallucinations” (2022) alongside an edition from last year’s “3FACE” project by Ian Cheng. These two mark the first-ever artificial intelligence (AI) and nonfungible token (NFT) additions to MoMA’s collection , already home to relics such as Andy Warhol’s soup cans and Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” The landmark acquisitions also supplement MoMA’s longtime legacy of pioneering exhibitions at the intersection of technology and art, from its 1968 show “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” through this year’s “Signals: How Video Transformed the World.” MoMA’s announcement arrived in tandem with an outline of the institution’s digital art programming for the fall and winter seasons ahead, inclu...