Agoria’s ‘Le Code d’Orsay’: In the Musee d’Orsay’s first NFT exhibition

Next month, for the first time in its history, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris will exhibit original artworks featuring blockchain technology.

Come February, the museum — a majestic 19th-century railway station on the left bank of the Seine, filled with masterpieces by Monet, Manet and Van Gogh — will feature nary a missing CryptoPunk or animated penguin. In fact, the new blockchain-powered art doesn't use a single screen.

“I don't think it would be very useful to build 30 screens in a museum like this,” says Sébastien Devaud, aka Agoria, the artist behind Orsay's upcoming high-tech exhibit, “Le Code d'Orsay.” Decrypt. “The question I've been asking for the whole year I've been working on this is: How can we rationalize the digital? How can we make the digital not the opposite of the physical?”

Devad's answer to those questions comes in the form of two works of art on display at the Orsay from February 13 to March 10. Both pieces, relying on different technologies, Devaud — a French DJ, electronic music producer and experimental artist — dubs “biological generative art.”

Devad's first piece, “Sigma Lumina,” created in collaboration with artist Johan Lescourt, consists of a vast steel sculpture that—hit by a perfect alignment of light above, at various intervals—casts a QR code form a shadow. Museum-goers who see and scan this code on their smartphones will be taken to a mobile site. Tezos blockchainOn top of that, you'll find a colorful swirl of art inspired by works from Impressionists such as Caillebotte, Degas and Renoir at the Orsay.

Patrons are encouraged by a docent on hand to blow into their phones. Doing so transforms these images into unique works of art, imprinted on Tezos, that guests will own forever.

“The museum's classic audience has the feeling that digital art is a monkey or a JPEG or something,” Devad said. “Now they say: I have wisdom from the Muse d'Orsay. I blew into my phone, made it, and now it's mine!'

“Imagine them in that room blowing their phones,” he added with a laugh. “I love this.”

The second part has nothing to do with blockchain technology, but everything to do with Devad's novel concept of biological generative art. The artist collaborated with four French top genomic researchers and biophysicists and with the help of a bioreactor developed a unique yeast culture – with its unique patterns and movements – representing five stages in the life of the French painter Gustave Courbet.

The project interprets these stages of the painter's life by juxtaposing microorganisms specifically with the 1855 edition of Courbet's iconic work “The Painter's Studio”, in which Courbet reflects on his life seven years earlier. That painting, and Devad's biochemical interpretation, hang side by side in the Orsay.

If blockchain and yeast experiments are a bit out of the world's most respected art institutions, you won't hear from Orsay's leadership.

In September, the museum announced A year-long partnership with the Tezos Foundation to discuss blockchain-powered artworks and artists with its collections. In the first phase of that collaboration, the Orsay debuted a number of chained digital memories linked to the museum's latest Van Gogh exhibition, which opened in October. The next level, represented by “Le Code d'Orsay”, does not include the other works displayed in the chain, but is a painting by itself.

Orsay chief curator Pierre-Emmanuel Lesserf sees a direct line of continuity between the trailblazing Impressionists who championed the museum's ethos and the disruption of contemporary artists such as Devaud.

The late 19th century was also a time of great technological and scientific upheaval, Lecerf says. Those reasons were inseparable from the work of the Impressionists, who raised the consensus of the ages by interpreting the concept of light and perspective.

“It's rooted in Web3,” says Lesurf. Decrypt “The Future”“The Orsay Code.” Exhibition. But he also agrees with these. [longstanding] Questions about the relationship between art and technology and between art and science.

According to Leserf, Devad's pieces are the perfect entry point for Orsay into Web3 art, given that connection.

“We didn't want to talk to Web3 just because it was hot,” Lecerf said. Otherwise, we would have done in 2021 like other museums – participated in auctions. [on-chain] They work and benefit financially.

“We did not choose this very conservative approach,” he continued. “What's important to us … is really a question of artistic merit.”

In the year Code of Orsay.

That incident further underscores what a well-known museum their ancestors' journey to France was a curious artistic rebellion.

But for Devad, there's no tension in the idea that high-decibel electro-pulses and colored lasers are blasting some of the world's most precious sculptures and paintings.

“I was in that museum by myself walking around all the amazingly legendary paintings and sculptures,” Devad said. “Modernism, in my opinion, when you look at it, it looks like it can be done in the future, it's really fresh.”

“These pieces were not in trend at the time; there was a lot of controversy when they were working on those artists,” he continued. “The visionary artists are the modern ones.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward.