As a world-wide first, The Whitworth Museum in Manchester has minted an artwork into an NFT. The NFT has been put up for sale on the Tezos-based NFT platform Hic Et Nunc (HEN). This is the first time an artwork from a museum collection has been minted into an NFT and sold.
As a world-wide first, The Whitworth Museum in Manchester has minted an artwork into an NFT. The NFT has been put up for sale on the Tezos-based NFT platform Hic Et Nunc (HEN). https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/168856 This is the first time an artwork from a museum collection is minted into an NFT and sold.
The Ancient of Days NFT is a rare and exclusive digital reading of the Whitworth’s original hand-coloured relief etching print by William Blake. The NFT image is generated through the use of John Rylands Research Institute and Library’s Multispectral Imaging (MSI), an Advanced Imaging technique that examines the physical attributes of the print.
The ability of the MSI to provide data on the content of an artwork, including pigment and ink analysis, makes this NFT a distinctive image that is born out of the multidisciplinary research, conservation and collections management expertise held across The University of Manchester.
The income raised by the sales of The Ancient of Days NFT will be used to fund social projects co-produced by the Whitworth and its constituents. By minting a collection-derived NFT for sale on the open market, this experiment will explore the potential of directing new flows of private digitised capital into social capital.
The Ancient of Days NFT is part of the Economics the Blockbuster which is a major new research and exhibition project, developed in collaboration with Alliance Manchester Business School. The project takes up economics as a social, as well as financial, set of relations; one that is shaped by us all through our everyday actions.
Over the next two years, the Whitworth will work with a range of practitioners, from artists, writers, and activists to environmentalists, bankers and technologists, to explore alternative economies.
We’ve decided to mint and sell The Ancient of Days NFT and to track the activity across the next couple of years and document and continue the conversations around it in the exhibition that will be held in the Whitworth in 2023. – Poppy Bowers, Curator Exhibitions of The Whitworth Museum.
The Whitworth is an art gallery in Manchester, England, containing about 55,000 items in its collection. The gallery received more than 440,000 visitors in its first year and was awarded the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year prize in 2015.
We wanted to think about how we could redistribute the wealthiest collections in the most democratic way. And this technology offers the opportunity to open up the collections in the world to the broadest possible way. – Alistar Hudson, director of The Whitworth Museum.
After much research we have decided that we will mint it on Tezos on a marketplace called Hic Et Nunc which currently has the most transactions accross the web in terms of NFT sales.
It feels like the right platform for us to be minting something because of the fact that it has this experimental and forward thinking approach to decentralization that is core to the principles of this NFT.
But also it is really great to see how this project could contribute to the community and bring it to another level by bringing a new player, Museums, into the story. – Bernadine Brocker Wieder, CEO and co founder of Vastari.
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