Established way back in 1764, the State Hermitage Museum is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg that is the world’s largest art museum in terms of gallery size and second-largest in terms of total square footage. Property of the Russian state, the Hermitage has a collection of over 3 million works of art and cultural artifacts from all around the world, including paintings, sculptures, works of applied art, archeological finds and others.
Like many other global art venues and top tourist destinations, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic had a huge impact on the Hermitage, resulting in it bringing its exhibitions online in March 2020 amid Russia’s first major countrywide lockdown. In 2020 alone, the museum reportedly experienced an 80% decline in visitors due to pandemic restrictions.
In response to the difficult situation, the Hermitage began exploring and adopting new ways to expose visitors to its art and attract new global audiences by embracing increasingly popular trends in digital art, including nonfungible tokens and the metaverse space.
In 2021, the Hermitage made a historic move into the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry by tokenizing the art hosted by the museum in the form of NFTs. To do so, the Russian museum partnered with cryptocurrency exchange Binance, selling several NFTs for thousands of dollars. The museum also started experimenting with the metaverse space by launching a virtual exhibition in late 2021.
In September 2021, the Hermitage made its first formal move in the nonfungible token industry, selling five pieces on Binance NFT for a combined total of $444,000. The pieces included digital copies of popular Hermitage-hosted artworks like Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Madonna Litta,” Claude Monet’s “Corner of the Garden at Montgeron” and Vincent van Gogh’s “Lilac Bush.”
Participation in the auction was open for all Binance users, allowing them to pay using the exchange’s U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoin, Binance USD. The auction’s highest bid was for Madonna Litta, with the lucky winner parting ways with 150,500 BUSD to buy the digital representation of the world-famous artwork.
The museum continued exploring the industry further by launching its first entirely digital exhibition in November. Called “The Ethereal Aether,” the exhibition featured around 40 NFT artworks in a metaverse-like virtual representation of the Hermitage. The free exhibition was aimed at experimenting with the metaverse without selling any NFT pieces.
The list of artworks featured in the exhibition included pieces like “Schrödinger’s Cat” from CryptoKitties, a popular blockchain-based game built by Canadian studio Dapper Labs on the Ethereum network.
The Hermitage is expected to continue shaping both the local and global museum experience by tokenizing artworks and enabling new ways to enjoy art in virtual reality and augmented reality. The museum is likely to continue on the path of digitalization even as visitors return to its physical environment after COVID-19 restrictions hopefully ease this year.
It’s crucial that the Hermitage continue taking into account the peculiarities of Russia’s cryptocurrency regulations, which are largely driven by the Central Bank of Russia’s harsh stance on the industry.
The Hermitage’s legal department managed to develop a model for the creation and sale of NFTs that was in compliance with Russian legislation in 2021, so the museum is expected to continue guiding local creators and crypto enthusiasts in 2022 to drive the adoption of the technology further.
Adoption
