The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia is selling digital artworks from a limited digital collection in the form of NFTs on the Binance NFT Marketplace.
The Hermitage has released a limited series of NFTs with digital copies of masterpieces from its collection. The auction opened on August 31 and will close on September 7.
“We are witnessing a historic moment – one of the world’s largest museum’s is entering the NFT market, said Helen Hai, head of Binance NFT.
She added: “The Binance NFT marketplace has become a thread linking the world of art and technologies, and for us that is a tremendous honour.”
Hermitage Museum enters the NFT market
The series features digital reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci‘s ‘Madonna Litta’, Vincent van Gogh‘s ‘Lilac Bush’, Giorgione‘s ‘Judith’, Wassily Kandinsky‘s ‘Composition VI’ and Claude Monet‘s ‘A Corner of the Garden at Montgeron’.
The tokenised digital works have been created in two copies – one copy will reside at the State Hermitage, and the other copy is up for auction on the Binance NFT Marketplace.
The copies have been signed by Mikhail Piotrovsky, general director of the State Hermitage. The starting price for each digital work has been set at $10,000 BUSD.
“The Hermitage is a conservative innovator, a conservative museum that uses the latest technologies,” Piotrovsky said. “We want to see how this form is received. The NFT is a philosophy, the aesthetic of possession.”
Binance NFT Marketplace auction opens
“Digital copies of works of art fill the internet, where in effect everyone has access to them, but an NFT gives a sense of ownership, and in our case a sense of involvement with a great museum,” Piotrovsky added.
The State Hermitage cares for a collection of more than 3 million works of art and artefacts, including paintings, graphic art, sculpture and works of applied art.
The Crypt, an NFT art museum for the digital age, recently launched online as the first virtual visitor attraction on the Virtually World platform.
Metapurse, an NFT fund started by Metakovan, also plans to build a virtual museum to display Beeple’s digital work of art, ‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’.
Image: State Hermitage Museum
