152-Year Old Art Museum Adds Digital Art to Its Collection with Bitcoin
- nmipublications
- Jun 15, 2015
- 2 min read
(ascribe.io) MAK is the first museum in the world to buy through an online gallery, a digital artwork, with digital currency (Bitcoin), which is digitally authenticated on the decentralised ledger that powers Bitcoin.
Founded as the “Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry” 152 years ago, MAK Vienna (Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art) is known for its strong, daring and innovative Contemporary Art department.
MAK Vienna may be the only museum in the world that has a bitcoin wallet. This is the only way it could purchase Event Listeners through the online gallery Cointemporary.
Founded by two Vienna based artists Valentin Ruhry and Andy Boot, Cointemporary is an online gallery / project space that is conceptually very distinctive. It displays one artwork every 10 days, during which people can purchase the work using bitcoin only. Cointemporary has partnered withascribe to authenticate the digital artworks and limited editions that are shown and sold through the gallery. This collaboration stems from the same MAK NITE Lab event as the one Event Listeners was created for. Buyers can collect the work knowing they have a cryptographic Certificate of Authenticity and secured ownership. According to MAK, this is the new form of collecting in the digital age.
Dr. Masha McConaghy
Independent Curator and Researcher with a PhD in Arts from the Panthéon-Sorbonne and Museology Degree from Louvre School, Paris, France. McConaghy has worked in the fields of exhibition organization in museums/galleries in Paris, Berlin, Belgium and Canada. She is the co-founder of ascribe.io and is interested in the physical past and digital future of art provenance.
ascrib.ioe is a service for artists, galleries and collectors to register, transfer and archive digital art. Users can claim ownership and have control over their digital property. ascribe allows artwork provenance to be verified, thereby strengthening the value proposition of digital art for the art market, collectors and archives.
Comments