Xavier Rey (director, Centre Pompidou) — Centre Pompidou acquires 18 NFTs

2023

Artists: Xavier Rey (director, Centre Pompidou), Marcella Lista (chief curator, new media) · Year: 2023 · Medium: Institutional acquisition — eighteen NFT-based artworks for the permanent collection · Substrate: Ethereum and Tezos blockchains; works by thirteen artists · Place: Paris, France · Institution: Centre Pompidou (Musée National d'Art Moderne) In February 2023, Centre Pompidou — the French national museum of modern and contemporary art — announced the acquisition of eighteen NFT-based artworks for its permanent collection. The acquisition, developed by chief curator Marcella Lista and approved by director Xavier Rey, included works by Sarah Meyohas (Cloud of Petals related), Claude Closky, Robness, Larva Labs (a CryptoPunk), and ten others. It was the first significant institutional NFT acquisition by a major European national museum. The Pompidou acquisition is particularly significant because of its curatorial framing. Rather than treating NFTs as a novelty category, Lista positioned them as continuous with the museum's existing new-media and conceptual-art holdings — placing the acquisition alongside the Pompidou's Vera Molnár, Manfred Mohr, and Nam June Paik collections rather than in a separate digital-art category. The curatorial argument was that NFTs are the latest medium in a practice lineage the museum has been building for fifty years. The acquisition set a precedent for other European national institutions. Subsequent announcements from V&A London, Centre Pompidou itself (expanded holdings), and other museums have followed similar curatorial framings. Lista has spoken publicly about the Pompidou's commitment to preserving NFTs — which require specific technical infrastructure that museums have not previously had to handle — as a long-term institutional responsibility rather than a speculative investment. Lore The acquisition was led by Pompidou's director of digital collection Marcella Lista, who had been advocating for institutional NFT acquisition since 2020 against substantial internal skepticism. Lista's case to the Pompidou's acquisitions committee took roughly eighteen months to negotiate, and the eventual eighteen-work selection was the result of a sustained curatorial argument about which specific NFT works would survive as historical documents rather than as market artifacts. The Pompidou's prior acquisitions of Vera Molnár (1976) and other 1960s computer-art pioneers gave the new acquisition specific institutional context — the curators argued, successfully, that the NFT works belonged in the same collection as the plotter drawings from sixty years earlier. The acquisition's announcement in February 2023 was widely covered in French art press; the works will be displayed in rotation in the museum's new digital-art galleries. Sources • Centre Pompidou — 2023 acquisition announcement • Lista, Marcella — curatorial essay (Centre Pompidou bulletin) • Le Monde, Artforum coverage