Quick take:
- MoMA New York will be the beneficiary of an art collection belonging to the William S. Paley Foundation.
- The art collection belonged to William Paley, the founder of the CBS broadcasting network.
- MoMA was entrusted with the care of the art collection since Paley’s death in 1990.
New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) today announced that it will be the beneficiary of an art collection belonging to the William S. Paley Foundation, to support MoMA’s ambitious goals in digital media and technology and to provide for new acquisitions
The art collection belonged to William Paley, the founder of the CBS broadcasting network. MoMA was entrusted with the care of the art collection since Paley’s death in 1990.
The William Paley Foundation has tapped Sotheby’s to auction 29 of 81 pieces in the art collection, which includes Pablo Picasso’s 1919 “Guitar on a Table” which will go for $20 million, as well as works by Renoir, Rosseau and Rodin.
According to Sotheby’s, Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes,” will be auctioned for at least $35 million in London this October.
MoMA may use the proceeds to launch its own streaming channel, host virtual exhibits and video chats with creators, or collaborate with universities and course providers to offer online courses.
While the museum has no intention of purchasing NFTs just yet, MoMA director Glenn Lowry said that the museum has a team dedicated to keeping an eye on the digital art sphere for NFT purchases or artist collaborators and that there is no reason why the museum should avoid NFTs.
“We’re conscious of the fact that we lend an imprimatur when we acquire pieces, but that doesn’t mean we should avoid the domain,” he said of NFTs in an interview with WSJ.
While MoMA is contemplating how it can expand its digital reach, the museum is no stranger to the NFT space as it provided the metadata of its entire art collection to AI artist Refik Anadol’s NFT project Unsupervised.
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