As an NFT, Bruegel is as good as ever

KHM is now also getting into NFT trading. The activities of the Belvedere and the Leopold Museum are stagnating, and plans to do so have been rejected by Albertina.

It looks a bit like a mirrored glass version of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “Winter Landscape,” a masterpiece of the Kunsthistorisches Museum: the digital image that NFT artist Seerlight proudly shared on his Instagram page this week. And announced a “collaboration” with KHM. What caused storms of enthusiasm among 68 of his 720,000 followers there: “Wow wow wow wow wow when you can show something in a Viennese gnom you made it like an artist. Congratulations” (complemented with three mini cones of ice cream emoticon). There may have been a slight misunderstanding.

Just as one generally has to explain the NFT, the Non-Fungible Token, to visitors to the Classical Museum, one also has to explain the KHM, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, to some crypto-art enthusiasts. Contemporary artists are not exhibited there unless they see themselves at least in the tradition of the historical avant-garde, such as Franz West or, more recently, Georg Baselitz. Copiers can also be found again and again in the museum’s picture gallery, but only at work, in their old easels, for example in front of Bruegel’s winter landscape. Maybe old-fashioned tablet artists will join them in the future.