What is the artistic worth of a 24-pixel computer-generated avatar? What makes a JPEG file more valuable than a Mark Rothko painting? These are questions that Jennifer Wong and Peter Hamilton, the founders of the brand-new Seattle NFT Museum (SNFT), hope to answer as one of the year's most anticipated new museums opens in 2022.
The 3,000-square-foot space in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood, which opened to the public on January 14, is divided into three exhibition platforms. Visitors will find 30 displays on each platform displaying NFT artworks by international and local artists. The museum's founders chose an unconventional setup for one simple reason: why go analog with a medium that isn't?
"Seeing it in a large format and feeling what it's like to be in a room, in a space not attached to a device, and just seeing it on display was one of the things that inspired us by visiting some of the first NFT galleries [...]," Hamilton told Travel + Leisure in an interview. "It's a completely different experience, and another aspect of museums is unquestionably community and connection, as well as the social aspect of what they can provide."
While both Wong and Hamilton are in the technology industry, they hope that SNFT will attract people from all walks of life who want to experience and learn about the medium that took the art world by storm last year. An education manager will be on hand at the museum to answer any questions about NFT and blockchain.
The museum's current star is Los Angeles-based artist Blake Kathryn, whose futuristic 3D pastel scenery has made her a crypto celebrity. Larva Labs' widely popular CryptoPunks avatars, Eric Calderon's (a.k.a. Snowfro) Chromie Squiggles, and works by conceptual artist Tyler Hobbs and several Seattle-based artists, including Neon Saltwater, Robbie Trevino, and photographer Charles Peterson, who has "minted" never-before-seen portraits of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain into NFTs, are also on display.
"Before NFTs, digital art was vastly underrepresented due to its right-click-save-as nature," Hamilton explained. "And several of these artists have been underrepresented and underappreciated, [...] and we're just really excited to start introducing some more notoriety to those types of artists and focus on their medium, their practice, their inspiration, just like you would work with a painter, but with their digital paintbrush."
Admission to the newly opened museum is $15. Would you go visit this NFT museum?
Source: https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/seattle-nft-museum-opens
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