#25 "With NFTs, we're unlocking the digital potential of eternity"
This episode was recorded in German.
According to the New York Times, museums around the world have been discovering new "business models" and audiences since the pandemic through unusual forms of digital participation. The Historisches Museum Saar is not in New York, London or Vienna, and on top of that it sits fourteen meters below Saarbrücken's Schlossplatz. But as of today (July 7, 2022), it is a digitally visible "first mover" on the blockchain.
In the summer edition of our podcast HOPE IS NOT A STRATEGY, we talk with museum director Simon Matzerath and NIFTEE CEO and founder Carmelo lo Porto about the untapped potential NFTs offer for the digital preservation, sharing and monetization of museum art.
On the initiative and with the support of the European NFT platform NIFTEE, the museum in Saarland is the first German museum to offer a physical work from its collection for sale as an NFT (100 pieces at €200 each). "The Arrival of King Wilhelm I in Saarbrücken" (1880) by Prussian court painter Anton von Werner (1843-1915) measures a full 17 square meters. After a year of live restoration, it is on display in the museum in color for the first time since 1944, and it can now also be experienced as roughly 200GB stored immutably on the decentralized blockchain.
SHOW NOTES:
Podcast episode "KING OF NFT" with Carmelo Lo Porto on the launch of NIFTEE
Preorder the book Hope Is Not a Strategy nowhereDetailed episode description: Table of contents
- Simon Matzerath: about him- Early developments with NFTs in the museum world- How the collaboration in Saarbrücken came about- The idea behind working with the Museum Saar- The painting- The goal of the project- Involving the team in the process and how the right work of art was found- How and where the NFTs can be purchased- How a painting is digitized- NFTs as an important development for museums- More exciting projects at NIFTEE- The potential of museums- The good cause behind the project- The vision of the blockchain- Advice and success factors- Advice from Simon Matzerath- Advice from Carmelo Lo PortoFor this strategy interview, Christian Underwood found himself back in his old home region, the Saarland. More precisely, at the Historisches Museum Saar, located 14 meters below Saarbrücken's Schlossplatz. What you find here is, at first glance, a very unusual pair, as will become clear in a moment. This is an absolute first. The episode is about the museum world and the NFT (non-fungible token) world growing together, at least in part. Christian Underwood talks with Simon Matzerath, director of the Historisches Museum Saar at Saarbrücken's Schlossplatz, where you can experience the fascinating and turbulent history of the German-French border region of the Saar since 1870. Also joining isCarmelo Lo Porto, CEO and founder of NIFTEE,the first European NFT platform. Late last year he already spoke on an episode of Hope Is Not a Strategy about the first NFTs released on NIFTEE. That episode is linked in the show notes.Simon Matzerath: about himSimon Matzerath studied in Cologne, Bonn, Tübingen and Paris and holds a master's degree in early history. From 2006 to 2011 he was a research associate at the Museum Zitadelle in Jülich, and from 2014 to 2016 co-curator of the sixth Archaeological State Exhibition of North Rhine-Westphalia at the LVR Landesmuseum in Bonn and the Lippisches Landesmuseum in Detmold. From 2016 to 2019, Matzerath was project lead and co-curator for the founding of the Museum of the Stone Age and the Present in Landau an der Isar, Lower Bavaria, and he has been in the Saarland since October 2016. There he is director of the Historisches Museum Saar, with a focus on the Saarland's regional history in the 19th and 20th centuries and, since 2020, on Saarbrücken Castle. He also teaches prehistory and early history at Saarland University.
Early developments with NFTs in the museum worldNFTs can be a good strategy for positioning an organization in an entirely new field of business. The unusual combination of NFTs and museums is becoming more popular, too. On Valentine's Day 2022, the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna sold Klimt's "The Kiss" as 10,000 NFTs for the first time, and the British Museum has also started releasing NFTs, entering the NFT business as a museum and taking a completely new path. The New York Times has looked into this new "business model" as well and tried to quantify how much revenue is possible. For museums, this can mean a lot of money and an alternative source of income, even if reproducing famous masterpieces creates value that goes beyond the financial.
How the collaboration in Saarbrücken came about
The unusual collaboration between the museum in Saarbrücken and the NIFTEE platform came about through a typical Saarland process: you know someone who knows someone, and that person brings the right people together. It's one of the Saarland's strengths. The museum and NIFTEE's office are only a few hundred meters apart. The decision to work together and run the project was made at the very first meeting, so things moved fast. The Saarland really has everything, including everything innovative, just in compressed form. Combined with the short distances, results can be produced especially quickly here. And right now there is a lot of momentum in the region.
The idea behind working with the Museum SaarCarmelo Lo Portohas already run major auctions with Cro and Kool Savas, which made him famous, and notorious, for exciting NFT projects. From the start of his work with NIFTEE, it was very important to the team to also look at the preservation angle. The blockchain and decentralized storage make it possible, for the first time in the history of digital goods, to verify documents. That means it's always clear when an object was created and where it came from. This angle already came up in the projects with Cro and Kool Savas. It's a way to preserve and document pop culture. That way, even in 20 or 30 years, people will still know who Kool Savas was with his lyrics "King of Rap" and what Cro stood for with his masks. This aspect was especially interesting for NIFTEE, so approaching museums and doing this kind of preservation there was hardly a stretch. The Museum Saar was a natural fit, partly because of the short distance, but also because of a very compelling painting. It had just been freshly restored, so it could be captured in that newly restored state. The original colors that define the work will be traceable forever via the blockchain. At NIFTEE, decentralized storage is a top priority. That means this object will remain available independently of the company and independently of the museum. In the Saarland, there's nothing that doesn't exist.
The painting The 19th-century painting at the center of this fascinating project is a work by von Werner. Anton von Werner was a Prussian court painter. Even though history painting spent a long stretch out of favor in art history, that didn't matter for this project. As a museum, you have a mandate to collect, preserve, exhibit and make available for research anything that relates to the history of Saarland and the history of the border region, meaning German-French history. Some time ago, the museum acquired a cycle of paintings by von Werner covering 55 square meters that hadn't been seen in 70 years. For more than 70 years it was considered lost, and it was in correspondingly poor condition. That's why the 17-square-meter main painting was restored, a painting even larger than Rembrandt's Night Watch. The painting has a pop-art quality. It is highly colorful, incredibly intense, full of realism and staged on a grand scale. At the same time, the painting raises a difficult subject, because it touches on nationalism. This town hall cycle, opened to the public in 1880, salvaged during a bombing raid in 1944 and then lost, has been the subject of much debate in recent decades over what should be done with it. Museum Saar sees its job as preserving the historical object, regardless of its size, and making it available for substantive discussion, whether analog or digital. That's why the collaboration with NIFTEE is a good thematic fit.
Goal of the projectThe primary goal of the project is to spread the museum's content to as many people as possible, in the right context and with objective information. Digitizing the artworks makes that possible. Money was not the deciding factor in this project, which was first and foremost a test case in a museum context. The main point was to refinance the project and support a charitable cause. For Museum Saar and for NIFTEE, the conservation angle is central at this stage. To get the project off the ground, an auction was chosen as the route, generating additional value for the museum beyond conservation.
How the team was involved in the process and how the right artwork was foundNot everyone understands the new combination of NFTs and museums yet. The museum team also had to dig into the topic intensively at the start. But together, they were able to get involved in the process. The choice fell on this particular painting because it was very tangible for the team. They spent more than a year restoring it and put a lot of work into it. There was also no better moment to capture the painting's newly restored original state. In about 30 years, it will need to be restored again. If the painting is damaged during a loan or in some other context, the digital artwork now exists in high resolution on the blockchain. After all that work, that's a reassuring thought.
How and where the NFTs can be purchasedStarting Thursday, July 7, 2022 at 11:00 a.m., there will be 100 NFT editions of the artwork, each priced at €200. Whether or not you're at the museum in person, and whether or not you're particularly interested in history, you can now own a piece of this painting. That's a genuinely exciting development. Normally, at best, you can view a painting in a museum for a limited period of time. Not all objects are on display at the same time or permanently. Space is limited, so the options for exhibitions aren't always there. NFTs, however, make it possible to capture something forever and access it at any time. If a painting has to be restored in the future, which often means restoring the colors to their original state and tracing as precisely as possible who restored it, when and how, it is now recorded immutably on the blockchain. In the case of the von Werner painting, there's also the fact that it sits in a specific historical context. Attempts are often made to change that historical context after the fact. Once it's written to the blockchain, that's no longer possible. That's an unprecedented development in human history.
How a painting is digitizedDigitizing the painting involved working with professionals. Put simply, they photographed and digitized the painting. That doesn't mean taking a single photo, but a great many high-resolution photos that are then stitched together. The result is a one-of-a-kind digital work. At the end of the process, it is stored on the blockchain, not centrally on a server. That ensures it can exist independently of whether NIFTEE, the Historisches Museum Saar or Saarland itself continue to exist. NFTs as an important development for museumsEvery museum is searching for the holy grail of conservation, analog and digital alike. On the digital side, there are various approaches. Databases are built on servers that then offer an online interface. Various processes run in the background, and in the case of the blockchain, you have an option designed to be more robust and longer-lasting, even permanent. In that role, it beats every other concept. That's why every museum has to grapple with how cultural heritage and cultural assets can be preserved and presented on the blockchain. This is a new level, one that hasn't been reached with this intensity in recent years. A rethinking process is starting again, and Museum Saar has now run this as a case study to get used to the process. The focus was on things like color fidelity, brilliance and true correspondence to the original. Once you see in the process that this works even at such large dimensions, the idea naturally follows that this is the central path to making objects last indefinitely. A transformation process lies ahead: it has to be clarified how this can be handled legally, and how access and control work for individual institutions. That development is still in its early stages, but it will keep moving forward. The most important step, getting started, has already been taken.
More exciting projects at NIFTEENIFTEE plans to keep going down the NFT path. From the start, it has been important to them to show what the technology makes possible. Working with a museum is something they find genuinely exciting. Take Ukraine, for example, where there's a risk that parts of the country's cultural heritage will be destroyed. There, the blockchain can be used as a strategy to truly preserve cultural assets so they survive independently of the country itself. As sad as that may sound, the approach is the right one. Just as museums need to think about a metaverse strategy, meaning a strategy for how to use Web3 to their advantage, the same applies to entire regions. NIFTEE also has a partnership with the Ahr Valley, for example. Last year, the Ahr Valley was hit by a devastating flood, and that flood is now being documented. A memorial is being created in the form of an artwork, and the company developed a strategy together with the Ahr Valley that goes into execution next week. There will be tokenized flood wines and digitized artworks, though nothing more can be revealed at this point. Flood wine, for anyone unfamiliar with it, is one of the biggest marketing campaigns for all the winemakers in the Ahr Valley whose bottles ended up in the floodwaters and were essentially unsellable as a result. That has already turned into an incredible project in its own right, and now it has been digitized.
What matters in the process is simply taking the first step instead of spending weeks or months looking for problems. Most of them can be cleared up as you go.
The potential of museumsMuseums hold enormous potential. But partly because of Covid, and more generally too, it has become harder to keep museums in the public consciousness. Right now, people often don't even think of visiting a museum in their free time. That's why museums have to create occasions that draw visitors in. The project with NIFTEE is exactly that kind of occasion: a reason to notice Museum Saar and the work behind it. Good work is often done that many people never see. NFTs bring museums to the attention of new audiences and spark an entirely new kind of interest. What matters for every museum, though, is that analog and digital never end up competing, but enrich each other instead. Once that principle is firmly in place, a lot can develop.
The good cause behind the projectThe money generated from selling the NFTs supports a good cause: the museum's support association. For years, it has run a project that helps school classes from across Saarland visit the museum. Now the project is being set up anew, and French school classes that couldn't make the trip without support will be included as well. The proceeds from the project can make a
meaningful contribution here, inviting school classes to the museum and giving them room for personal growth.
Pure NFT museums? The future of museumsMuseums keep evolving. Museum Saar already offers a digital 3D walkthrough. And you hear more and more about the first purely NFT-based museums opening in various locations. These fully digital museums will definitely play a major role in the future. We're still at the very beginning of what will one day be called the metaverse. It's taking shape piece by piece, and NFTs are among its building blocks. The way we handle objects, digital goods and our own culture is changing radically right now. It's becoming possible to view things anywhere in the world without actually being there. NFTs can be used to attribute cultural assets beyond doubt to a region, an artist and a museum. Those are real advantages, because questions of wartime and looted art keep resurfacing today. Beyond that, whether a document is an original or a forgery can be answered clearly. Blockchain will certainly contribute here and offers clear solutions for the future. Every development happening in this direction now will contribute to and help shape what the overall picture looks like in the end. That's the opportunity NIFTEE and Museum Saar see in working together, and it's genuinely great that it's happening here in the Saar region. In Germany, that puts us right at the forefront.
The vision of blockchainBlockchain is a display window. A window that creates occasions and puts things center stage that nobody knew in a museum context before and that would otherwise have stayed out of reach. In the end, that window can lead people to visit other places, open up their perspective and their view of the world, and want to create experiences elsewhere. Blockchain is an extension of what already exists. It makes the offering more specific, more tangible, more accessible, and that makes it an ideal step up built on what's already there.
Advice and success factorsTaking new paths can be hard, especially with topics far outside your industry, such as combining NFTs and museums as in this example. To close, Simon Matzerath and Carmelo Lo Porto share their advice and success factors for a process like this with all strategy makers working in museums.
Advice from Simon Matzerath It can be difficult for museums, but it's always better not to start with a circle of chairs and a long discussion about what problems might arise. Fundamentally, you should respond to real situations. That means opening up, taking new paths, actually walking them, then gathering experience and adjusting. You have to protect your appetite for experimentation and act on it. It's no disaster if the tenth experiment goes wrong, because by then you've done nine things that moved you forward.
Advice fromCarmelo Lo PortoOn one hand, it's important for museums to open up to new possibilities. On the other, it's just as important that people from outside the field, who have little to do with culture or contemporary culture, open up as well. Carmelo himself learned an enormous amount about art and art conservation while working together over the past few weeks. There are fascinating worlds out there. So: go to the museums and take a look.