Benoit Couty and his wife Thuy-Tien Vo grew up around classical art paintings, books, and museum visits, but when they were 50, they found NFT and decided to start promoting digital art. This code is the address of MoCA, the first "crypto-art" museum in France. It opened in 2018. To get to it, you need an internet connection, since it is online and has about 800 works. With it, the two artists want to support this new kind of digital art, which they call "committed" because it is based on ideas from the early days of the internet, like sharing information or having freedom. He says that this "crypto-art" is different from digital art in general because it has recurring themes like man and machine, questions about life and death, and connections to the Renaissance.
Benoit Couty is also the artistic director and co-founder, along with a hundred other NFT fans, of a physical gallery near the Centre Pompidou in Paris that is dedicated to NFT. This exhibition and workspace, which is called the "NFT Factory" and holds training sessions, opened on Saturday. It's a new step for him since the first NFT he bought was "a land in the metaverse." These digital universes were seen as the future of the Internet at the time.
The NFT Factory, 137 rue Saint-Martin, Paris
Pascal Boyart was the first artist to make NFTs from his murals. One of his murals was called "Liberty Leading the People in Yellow Vests," which was based on a painting by Eugene Delacroix. "Their works had such energy and spontaneity that I wanted to show them in a big museum, which I called the Crypto Art Museum." "At the start of 2019, the works cost 10 euros to 100 euros. They can be worth anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 euros today "He also says.
The NFT Factory, 137 rue Saint-Martin, Paris
Thuy-Tien Vo, on the other hand, says that she "was a spectator for a long time before diving into the Rabbit Hole," which is what the French call an unknown world in another reality, a reference to "Alice in Wonderland." For the three years of MoCA, which ends at the end of 2021, the couple showed on screens in the former Pierre Cardin museum 50 works from the museum's permanent collection and 30 works made especially for this event. "I was raised on classical art by parents who were collectors, so I think crypto-art will stick around once the NFT fever dies down, which it has already done. We can see that it leads to the same kinds of rejections, but also the same kinds of collaborations and imitations as other movements in art history, such as pop art ", she says.
Jean Dubreil