How Museums Can Employ Technology to Better Leverage Their Art Collections
Over the last three years, as many museums have had to contend with declining revenues, reduced visitor numbers and shifting trends in audience engagement, some began to look more keenly at new ways to leverage their art collections with the help of technology. How might the use of various technologies allow museums to utilize their collections in ways that can better attract and engage audiences, and help to develop new revenue streams? In this article we’ll explore this question and offer some possibilities.
There is a huge monetization opportunity for museums, given the large portion of assets in collections that lie in storage and are not exhibited to the public. According to Michael O’Hare, a professor of public policy at Berkeley, any premier museum “exhibits no more than a twentieth of its collection, often much less.” In other words, almost every museum today is sitting on a vast trove of valuable assets in its collection that are not exposed to visitors and which, with some creative thinking and technological know-how, could be monetized to a considerable degree.
One way to do this is on the tip of the tongue — Non-fungible Tokens (NFT). NFTs offer a promising avenue for museums to enter a thriving market of unique digital assets, position themselves as leaders in the evolving world of digital art, and ensure the authenticity of their collections. Yet, the Blockchain technologies behind NFTs might not necessarily present the best strategy in the case of museums.
What are the opportunities and limitations of Blockchain technologies, and what are some other potential digital strategies for museums to monetize their art collections?
Opportunities and Limitations of NFTs for Museum Collections
Blockchain is often praised as a trustworthy technology due to its immutability, stability, and decentralized nature. In general, proponents of NFTs and Blockchain technology argue that these qualities make NFTs well-suited to solving the problem of provenance and authenticity for digital art. When interviewed for the WBUR radio show On Point, the artist Matt Kane remarked, “For me as an artist, I look at NFTs as providing digital art with unforgeable, trustless, provable provenance. Provenance is simply a record of ownership: of who owned it, when they sold it, and for how much. So NFTs are really replacing the flimsy technology of paper certificates of authenticity and having trust in centralized galleries for provenance.” And given their unique, non-fungible nature, NFTs have also emerged as a way to sell digital art that otherwise could be endlessly copied. Or, as Aram Sinnreich of American University has put it, NFTs exist to “impose artificial scarcity on something that’s infinitely reproducible with the click of a button.” NFTs offer a gateway for museums to convert digital versions of their entire collections into authentic and unique collectibles, including the bulk of those collections that otherwise lie idle in museum vaults.
However, each of these Blockchain strengths has its limitations.
Immutability can make correcting errors in records impossible. While it is important for fraud prevention, this concept has a drawback when it comes to the provenance of digital art assets. For instance, if an NFT’s attribution turns out to be incorrect, those inaccuracies may become permanently baked into the provenance recorded on the Blockchain.
Another hallmark of Blockchain technologies, stability, can also be illusory. It is important to recognize that an NFT in the art context is not a copy of an artwork but a URL that points to an artwork (and which acts as a certificate or a “deed” of ownership of that artwork). How the NFT certificate and the underlying digital asset linked to it are stored and maintained can be, and often is, quite different. In fact, according to stats by YourNFTs, and independently verified by ClubNFT, only 10% of the digital art linked to NFTs does reside on the Blockchain. 40% of the NFT digital art linked to NFTs is located on private servers managed by tech startups and marketplaces. If these startups fail, they typically shut down their private servers, leaving art collectors and NFT asset owners with links or “deeds” pointing to nowhere.
The Blockchain’s decentralized nature, crucial for maintaining the system and verifying transactions, has not translated as well into practical applications from the end user standpoint. In practice, virtually all users who want to access the Blockchain do so through one of a few centralized platforms that provide access to create or add transaction records on a digital ledger. Most people who have bought or sold NFTs, for example, have done so via a centralized Blockchain platform of some sort. You can argue, therefore, that the registration and sale of digital collectibles by museums, whether as NFTs on the Blockchain or through some other technical solution independent of the Blockchain, is not all that different in practice from an end-user perspective.
The lack of an explicit legal framework around NFT ownership is also challenging. To quote Aram Sinnreich again, “We don’t know what the laws for NFTs are because Congress hasn’t written any, and no courts have really had to judge it yet. So, this is a completely open space, where the people investing in these products have no idea how legally enforceable their claims will be.”
These limitations do not rule out the use of Blockchain technologies and NFTs for monetizing museum art collections, but they certainly complicate matters and should be factored into the decision-making process around what digital strategy is best suited to help leverage the value of museum collections better.
Collaboration with Online Marketplaces
By partnering and integrating with an online marketplace as a commercial platform to introduce their digital assets, museums gain access to a broader audience beyond their visitors and patrons and, potentially, to the platform’s tools to simplify the registration and distribution process.
Digital art marketplaces can offer a decentralized model or a centralized one. For example, OpenSea, one of the largest NFT marketplaces, is centralized. It uses Google Cloud Platform for hosting and as a caching layer for NFTs, yet it does not own the NFTs nor choose where NFTs are hosted. In contrast, SuperRare leverages a decentralized protocol, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), to store the digital assets associated with each NFT. SuperRare also uses the Ethereum blockchain to store information about each NFT, including ownership, transaction history, and metadata.
From another perspective, online marketplaces are becoming a space where museums can not only introduce and monetize their digitized art collections — but build on them with a limited number of “fractionalized” digital copies of a single artwork. For instance, in 2022, the Belvedere Museum in Austria announced an NFT drop of Klimt’s Kiss: a high-resolution digital copy was divided into a 100 x 100 grid, resulting in 10,000 unique individual pieces offered as NFTs, which then were sold on the Nimi platform.
Customized Platforms for Museum Collections
If a museum has developed a clear vision of how they wish to maximize the value of their collections digitally, then they may consider building their own customized platform or leverage a solution from a technology software provider. Some of the world’s foremost museums have taken the former approach and developed their digital collections in-house, such as the Louvre’s Collections database and the Whitney’s collection of over 26,000 works. Others, such as the Frick Collection, have chosen to work with a collections management solution provider such as Gallery Systems, whose software suite includes their “eMuseum” online collections software supporting look and feel customizations for flexible design.
Digital startups have also infiltrated this space. Those now collaborating closely with museums and cultural institutions to build innovative and educational tools around their collections include Cuseum, whose “digital docent” self-guided, multilingual, multimedia-enhanced alternative to standalone museum audio guides has won awards.
Holographical and AR Technologies
The rise of holographical and AR technologies has created the potential for holographical NFTs to enhance the value of museum collections and lead to better audience engagement. They offer visitors a new way of experiencing digital art by elevating a 2D object into a more immersive 3D rendering using AR technology. As NFTs, they represent something more original than simply a recreation of the artifact.
An example of using holographical technologies to monetize museum collections is the Morpheus Project, a blockchain-based platform that aims to create a new ecosystem for NFTs, which can be bought or sold like physical assets. The platform offers a range of features and tools for managing NFT collections.
One more prominent example of implementing holographic technology to showcase art is a collaboration between Proto Hologram and Christie’s Ventures. In 2022, Christie’s auction house teamed up with Proto to display several artworks by Edgar Degas, Alberto Giacometti, and the Lalannes. Later, Christie’s also used the new Proto M designed to fit in smaller spaces to display bronze works by François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne in Hong Kong to preview the Sculpting Paradise: The Collection of Marie Lalanne auction in New York.
Open Licensing for Education and Engagement Purposes
If the central purpose of an art museum is, per Michael O’Hare, more, better engagement with art, then open licensing is an important tool for museums to distribute their digital art collections to the widest possible audience and to promote their collections as a virtual learning resource to stimulate our engagement.
One example of using open licensing is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which has partnered with Rijksstudio (an online platform that allows users to download, share, and remix high-resolution images of artworks) to provide free access to over 700,000 digitized images of artworks from the museum’s collection.
Another valuable example of the power of open licensing example is The Google Cultural Institute, which offers virtual walking tours of hundreds of museums around the world, with thousands of works available in very high resolution (in some cases, surpassing what one gets standing in front of the real painting).
Conclusion
By leveraging technology to reimagine and maximize the value of their collections, museums have exciting opportunities to increase their revenue and attract new audiences, especially younger, digitally-native collectors.
Whether museums choose to build their own bespoke platforms for their collections, partner with external software providers, or collaborate with online digital marketplaces, technology has an important role in the fundamental museum mission of more and better engagement with their art collections. Making limited editions of museum-certified digital collectibles available for sale also has an important social benefit in addition to the commercial: in purchasing a digital collectible, you get to own a small piece of that museum and part of an authentic cultural or artistic heritage being preserved by the museum.
To what extent and in what form museums choose to explore and capitalize on these opportunities to leverage their digital assets in new and innovative ways is likely to vary based on their strategic thinking, financial means, their need to attract new visitors, and their appetite to create new revenue streams from digital offerings. It is certainly a space that museum lovers, technology enthusiasts, managers and custodians of museum collections, and collectors themselves should be watching closely.
Author: Doron Fagelson,
Vice President of Media and Entertainment Practice at DataArt
Originally published on https://www.dataart.com/blog.
