A historic moment for crypto art, as this NFT becomes a permanent collection of the world's most important contemporary art museum.

MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, received 2.19 million visitors in 2022. At MoMA, you can see Van Gogh's "Starry Night", Picasso's "Young Girl of Avignon", Monet's "Water Lilies", Rousseau's "The Dream", and more.

During the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, I introduced "Beef Brothko", which has surged nearly 30 times. In that article, we mentioned Mark Rothko, an outstanding representative of the New York School of painting, whose works are also collected by MoMA. (Recommended reading: Beef Brothko: "Abstract Beef" that has surged nearly 30 times in the NFT market)

About a week ago, when I introduced the new hot spot "Goose" on Bitcoin NFT, I mentioned MoMA's first step into the NFT world - MoMA Postcard. This should be the most influential case so far in which a real-world art museum personally explores the NFT world. Fifteen artists from 35 cities, 11 countries, and 5 continents collaborated, each proposing a creative theme, and each contributing a work to someone else's creative theme. Finally, they converged into 15 MoMA Postcards with different themes. However, the "postcards" created by these 15 artists are not for sale. MoMA launched this project to allow everyone to collaborate on art creation using Web3 technology on a global scale. Everyone will receive their own blank "postcard" through the Autonomy App and use MoMA's "palette" to create pixel art, put the work on the chain, and then pass the "postcard" to the next collaborator until the creation of the "postcard" is completed with the other 14 creators. (This project will be launched on the Tezos chain and currently requires Waitlist application, link)

And now, we have even more explosive news - MoMA has permanently collected works by crypto artists Refik Anadol (@refikanadol) and Ian Cheng (@eyecheng).

The work "Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations—MoMA" by Refik Anadol, which is collected by MoMA, does not belong to any secondary market where it can be purchased as part of Refik Anadol's series. Since the end of last year, Refik Anadol's "Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations" has been exhibited at MoMA, and the exhibition has recently been extended until October 29. Refik Anadol used a complex machine learning model to train public data from MoMA's collection and reinterpreted the charm of past collections with modern technology's imagination.

In addition to the works that have been on public display at MoMA for a long time, there is another accompanying work called "Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations—MoMA 1/1". In this work, I saw elements from Refik Anadol's series "Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations—MoMA Dreams" that can be purchased on the secondary market.

「Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations—MoMA 1/1」

Refik Anadol's works were donated to MoMA by 1OF1, a digital art collection organization led by Ryan Zurrer (@kukulabanze), and RFC Art Collection, a digital art collection series by Pablo Rodríguez-Fraile and Desiree Casoni.

The Ian Cheng works collected by MoMA can be directly purchased on the secondary market through the "3FACE" series. What's interesting about 3FACE is that it uses code to read the on-chain data of the holder and creates a "face" that emerges from the pool based on this data. Whenever the NFT is sold or transferred, the script runs again so that 3FACE can accurately depict its new owner. Are you a seasoned "whale"? A novice "shrimp"? A ruthless Degen? Or an art enthusiast? 3FACE will depict your image.

「3FACE」

Ian Cheng's work was donated to MoMA by the digital art platform Outland.

These two encryption artists will definitely leave their mark in NFT history, but for now it seems that Refik Anadol has stolen the limelight. Whether it's news coverage in the media or discussions on Twitter, almost everything revolves around Refik Anadol, and it seems that Ian Cheng has been forgotten... Judging from the secondary market performance of the works of these two artists, Refik Anadol is also taking the lead.

After the news came out, Refik Anadol's NFT series "Wind of Yawanawa" stood out, rising from around 6 ETH to 8 ETH, with a trading volume of over 100 ETH. At the same time, "Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations—MoMA Dreams" also rose from 1.5 ETH to 2 ETH, with a trading volume of nearly 20 ETH.

On the other hand, Ian Cheng's "3FACE" only increased from 0.138 ETH to 0.155 ETH, with a trading volume of only about 6 ETH, which is significantly lower compared to "Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations—MoMA Dreams".

Finally, there is an interesting episode. If we examine MoMA's Ethereum wallet, we will find a bunch of other NFTs besides "Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations—MoMA 1/1" and "3FACE". Do not use this as an investment basis, because @Vince_Van_Dough announced on October 3 that he had discovered MoMA's wallet address and made it public, which caused a large number of NFT enthusiasts to send NFTs to MoMA's wallet...

MoMA 地址中的一堆 NFT

A bunch of NFTs in MoMA's address

@Vince_Van_Dough discovered the ETH address of the NFT art piece collected by MoMA and made it public before collecting it.

NFT art track has not received as much attention from NFT players as PFP, but I believe its potential is much higher than PFP. Today, we can no longer simply understand NFT as a new art medium. It has developed into a new form of modern art, and encrypted art/generative art is definitely the new trend of our generation. Whether it is the change of art medium, the unique features and culture of decentralization, or the unpredictable sparks generated by cold code in generative art, they are all new artistic charms of the new era.

Top art museums have launched their own NFT projects and have their own NFT collections. MoMA has made me extremely excited. This NFT and even the milestone moment of crypto art is just the beginning!

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