Major Paris Art Museum to Exhibit CryptoPunks, Autoglyphs NFTs

NFTs are coming to the epicenter of the Parisian art world.

On Friday, Centre Pompidou—home to France’s National Museum of Modern Art—announced plans for a new exhibition examining the relationship between art and the blockchain that will feature NFTs from the valuable CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs projects, among works by 12 other digital artists.

CryptoPunk #110 and Autoglyph #25 were both donated to Centre Pompidou and will appear at the museum this spring, as will 16 other NFT works from a global assortment of artists.

The exhibition will mark the first time that the Centre Pompidou has accepted NFTs into its collection, which houses masterpieces by such groundbreaking artists as Vassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, and Frida Kahlo, among others. Centre Pompidou is the largest modern art museum in Europe.

Seeing CryptoPunk #110 displayed in the Centre Pompidou, arguably the world's most prestigious contemporary art museum, is a great moment for the Web3 and NFT ecosystem, and we're honored to help drive this cultural conversation," Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano said in a statement.

Yuga, which owns the CryptoPunks IP, donated the NFT to the museum through its Punks Legacy Project. That initiative, which seeks to place CryptoPunks in prominent museums around the world, kicked off with a donation of CryptoPunk #305 to Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art in November.

CryptoPunks Come to Art Museums as Yuga Labs Begins Donating Ethereum NFTs

CryptoPunks, minted on the Ethereum blockchain, are one of crypto’s most dominant and enduringly popular profile picture (PFP) NFT collections. There are 10,000 CryptoPunks in circulation, the cheapest of which can be bought for 63 ETH, or roughly $95,000, according to CoinGecko. CryptoPunks have routinely sold for millions of dollars a piece, even during the current bear market.

Autoglyphs, meanwhile, are much rarer. The Ethereum-based generative art project from Larva Labs, the original creator of CryptoPunks, features just 512 NFTs in total. The current floor price (or price of the cheapest listed NFT) for that project is a whopping 249 ETH, or just over $377,000. Larva Labs donated the piece to Centre Pompidou.