Pompidou Digital Art Committee: What It Means for Onchain Art - nft culture
The Centre Pompidou has established a new five-year patrons’ circle to fund the acquisition, conservation, and exhibition of digital art, with a specific focus on onchain works.
The Pompidou Digital Art Committee is a new five-year patrons’ circle, running from 2026 to 2031, that will pay for the Centre Pompidou to acquire, conserve, research, publish, and exhibit digital art.
The Paris museum says the committee will pay particular attention to onchain art, meaning works created and registered on a blockchain, and to new forms of generative art.
Its founding patrons are Ismail Tazi and Benjamin Gross. The Paris building is closed for renovation until 2030, so for now the collection is on view in Shanghai, at the Hamburger Kunsthalle from November 20, and online.
The committee “seeks to bring together French and international patrons who wish to support the institution in its commitment to digital art.” In practice it has three jobs: acquisitions, sharing the work, and conservation.
The release lists Xavier Rey, the museum’s director, along with Marcella Lista, head of the New Media department, and Philippe Bettinelli, a curator in that department.
The museum says the committee adds to, rather than replaces, the support it already gets from the Friends of the Centre Pompidou. It calls the idea a “collective mobilisation of art collectors and key members of the digital scene,” aimed at “creating sustainable ties between the museum and the communities dedicated to these practices.”
Building on 2023 acquisitions
The committee is a new step, but the Pompidou has been collecting this work for years. In February 2023 the museum announced that 18 blockchain-related projects by 13 French and international artists, which joined the collection by donation or purchase.
The list included Larva Labs’ CryptoPunk #110 and Autoglyph #25, Sarah Meyohas’s Bitchcoin, Rafael Rozendaal’s Horizon works, John F. Simon Jr.’s Every Icon #419, Jonas Lund’s Smart Burn Contract (Hoarder), Jill Magid’s Hand-hacked Bouquet 1, and pieces by aaajiao, Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion, Claude Closky, Fred Forest, John Gerrard, Agnieszka Kurant, and Robness.
Even then the curators drew a clear line. The 2023 press release said the goal was “not so much to focus on the cultural phenomenon of ‘collectibles’” but on “the most daring creative uses of these technologies.”
That explains the mix: a CryptoPunk sits next to conceptual contract works and net art pioneers, chosen as art history rather than as a market index.
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