Strategy Interview with Simon Matzerath, Director Historisches Museum Saar and Carmelo Lo Porto, CEO NIFTEE
According to the New York Times, since Corona, many museums around the world are discovering new "business models" and target groups through unusual ways of digital participation. The Historisches Museum Saar is not located in New York, London, or Vienna, and it is not even fourteen meters below Saarbrücken's Schlossplatz. But as of today (07.07.2022), it is a digitally visible "first mover" in the blockchain.
In our summer edition of the HOFFNUNG IST KEINE STRATEGIE podcast, we talk to museum director Simon Matzerath and NIFTEE CEO and founder Carmelo lo Porto about the unimagined potential NFTs offer for the digital preservation, sharing, and monetization of museum art.
On the initiative and with the support of the European NFT platform NIFTEE, the house in Saarland is the first German museum to offer a physical work of art from its exhibition for sale as an NFT (100 pieces á €200.00). The "Arrival of King William I in Saarbrücken"(1880) by the Prussian court painter Anton von Werner (1843-1915) is a whole 17 square meters in size and stands after a one-year live restoration, for the first time since 1944 in color in the museum and with about 200GB immutable in the decentralized blockchain experience.
SHOWNOTES:
Podcast episode "KING OF NFT" with Carmelo Lo Porto on the launch of NIFTEE.
Pre-order the book Hope is not a strategy now here
Detailed episode description:
Table of contents
- Simon Matzerath Information about the person
- First developments with NFTs in the museum world
- How the cooperation came about in Saarbrücken
- The idea to cooperate with the Museum Saar
- The painting
- Objectives of the project
- Involvement of the team in the process and how the suitable artwork was found
- How and where the NFTs can be purchased
- How a painting is digitized How a painting is digitized
- NFT as an important development for museums
- Other exciting projects at NIFTEE
- The potential of museums
- The good purpose of the project
- The vision of blockchain
- Advice and success factors
- Advice from Simon Matzerath
- Advice from Carmelo Lo Porto
For this strategy interview, Christian Underwood has made it to his old home, the Saarland. To be more precise, to the Saar Historical Museum, which is located 14 meters below Saarbrücken's Schlossplatz.
Here is a, at first glance, very unusual pair to find, as will be clarified in the following. It is about an absolute premiere. This episode is about the museum and NFT (Non-Fungible Token ) landscape growing together a bit.
To that end, Christian Underwood talks in an interview with Simon Matzerath, director of the Historisches Museum Saar at Saarbrücken's Schlossplatz, where you can experience the exciting and eventful history of the Franco-German border region of Saar since 1870. Carmelo Lo Porto, CEO and founder of NIFTEE, the first European NFT platform, will also be a guest. He already talked about the first launched NFTs at NIFTEE in an episode Hope is not a strategy at the end of last year. The episode is linked in the show notes.
Simon Matzerath Personal Information
Simon Matzerath studied in Cologne, Bonn, Tübingen and Paris and holds a master's degree in early history. From 2006 to 2011 he was a research assistant at the Museum Zitadelle in Jülich, and from 2014 to 2016 he was co-curator of the sixth NRW State Archaeological Exhibition at the LVR Landesmuseum in Bonn and the Lippisches Landesmuseum in Detmold. In addition, from 2016 to 2019, Mr. Matzerath was project director and co-curator for the founding of the Museum for Stone Age and Present in Landau an der Isar in Lower Bavaria and also already since October 2016 in Saarland. Mr. Matzerath is director of the Historisches Museum Saar there, focusing on Saarland's 19th and 20th century regional history and, since 2020, on Saarbrücken Castle. He also has a teaching position at Saarland University for prehistory and early history.
First developments with NFTs in the museum world
The topic of NFT can be a good strategy for placing a company in a completely new business field. The unusual combination of NFT and museum is also becoming more popular. On Valentine's Day 2022, the Austrian Belvedere Gallery in Vienna sold Klimt's "The Kiss" for the first time in the form of 10,000 NFTs, and the British Museum has also started to display NFTs and entered the NFT business as a museum, breaking a completely new ground.
The New York Times has also looked at this new "business model" and tried to quantify how much can be turned over there. For museums, this can be a lot of money in doubt and an alternative source of income, even if the value goes beyond the financial value when it comes to reproducing famous masterpieces.
How the collaboration came about in Saarbrücken
The unusual collaboration between the museum in Saarbrücken and the NIFTEE platform came about through a typical Saarland process: you know someone who knows someone, and they then bring the right people together - one of Saarland's strengths. The museum and the NIFTEE office are only a few hundred meters apart. The decision to work together and implement the project was made at the very first meeting, and thus very quickly. In the Saarland there really is everything, including everything innovative, but in a compressed form. Combined with the short distances, results can be produced particularly quickly here. Basically, there is also currently a lot of movement in this region.
The idea to collaborate with the Saar Museum
Carmelo Lo Porto has already held large auctions with Cro and Kool Savas and has thus become famous and notorious for exciting NFT projects.
From the very beginning of the work with NIFTEE, it was very important for the team to also shed light on the aspect of conservation. Blockchain and decentralized storage make it possible for the first time in the history of digital goods that documents can also be verified. This means that it is always possible to clearly trace when and from where which object came. This aspect has also been highlighted in the projects with Cro and Kool Savas. It's a way of preserving and recording pop culture. In this way, even in 20 to 30 years, people will always know who Kool Savas was with the text King of Rap and what Cro stood for with his masks. This aspect was particularly exciting for NIFTEE, which is why it was not at all out of the question to approach museums and do this kind of preservation there. The Saar Museum offered itself on the one hand because of the short distance, but on the other hand also because of a very exciting painting. This had just been freshly restored, so it could be captured in a freshly restored state. The original colors that make up the artwork will thus be forever traceable via the blockchain. NIFTEE places a lot of emphasis on decentralized storage. This means that this object will also be available independently of the company and independently of the museum. In Saarland, there is simply nothing that does not exist.
The painting
The 19th century painting worked with in this exciting project is a von Werner. Anton von Werner was a Prussian court painter. Even though history painting was not a big topic in art history for a while, this fact was not important for the project. Because as a museum one has the task to collect, to preserve, to exhibit and to make available for research things which concern the history of Saarland and also the history of the border region, i.e. the German-French history. Some time ago, the museum acquired a cycle of 55 square meters of paintings by von Werner, which had not been seen for 70 years. It had been lost for over 70 years and was accordingly in a very poor condition. That is why the main painting of 17 square meters was restored - a painting even larger than Rembrandt's Night Watch. The painting is a pop-like picture. It is very colorful, incredibly intense with a lot of realism and a very big staging. On the other hand, the painting also raises a difficult issue because it has something to do with nationalism. Around this town hall cycle, which was opened to the public in 1880 and was recovered in 1944 during the bombing and disappeared, there have been many discussions in recent decades, with the question of what should be done with it. The Saar Museum sees its task in preserving the historical object, regardless of its size, and making it available for a content-related discussion - whether analog or digital. Therefore, the cooperation with NIFTEE fits thematically well here.
Objective of the project
The primary objective of the project is to spread the contents of the museum in the right context with objective information to as many people as possible. This can be ensured by digitizing the artworks. Money was not the decisive factor in this project, where the whole thing was also to be tried out first in the museum context. Primarily, it was about refinancing the project, as well as supporting a charitable cause. For the Museum Saar and also for NIFTEE, the conservation line is central at this point. In order to make the project possible, an auction was chosen in order to generate additional value for the museum beyond conservation.
Involvement of the team in the process and how the appropriate artwork was found
The new combination of NFT and museum is not yet understood by everyone. The museum team also had to deal with it very intensively at the beginning. Together, however, they were then able to engage in this process together. They then chose this very painting because it was very concrete for the team. They restored it for over a year and put a lot of work into it. Moreover, there was no better time to record the painting's original state, which has now been restored. In about 30 years, it will have to be restored again. Should the painting be damaged in a loan accident or in some other context, then there is now the digital artwork, high-resolution in the blockchain. After all the work, this represents a reassuring factor.
How and where to buy the NFTs
From Thursday, 07/07/2022 at 11:00 there will be 100 NFT copies of the artwork, which will cost 200€ each. Regardless of whether you are on site at the museum or if you are particularly interested in history, you can now participate in this painting,. This development represents a particularly exciting factor. Normally, in the best case, a painting can be viewed in a museum for a limited period of time. Not all objects are always exhibited at the same time and permanently. Since space is limited, there are not always the appropriate possibilities for exhibitions. However, NFTs make it possible to hold on to something forever and access it at any time. If a painting needs to be restored in the future, which often involves restoring the colors to their original state and tracking as closely as possible how it was restored, by whom and when, then it is now immutable in the blockchain. In the case of von Werner's painting, it is also a painting that has a specific historical context. The historical context is often attempted to be changed afterwards. But by writing it down in the blockchain, this is no longer possible. This is a unique development in human history.
How to digitize a painting
To digitize the painting, there are professionals who have been worked with in the project. They photographed the painting - simply put - and digitized it. For this, however, not simply a photo is made, but very many, high-resolution photos are made, which are then put together accordingly. From this the digital unique specimen is created. At the end of the process, it is stored in the blockchain and not centrally on a server. This ensures that it can exist independently of the existence of NIFTEE, the Saar Historical Museum or the Saarland in general.
NFT as an important development for museums
All museums are always looking for the holy grail of conservation - analog as well as digital. In digital, there are different approaches. Databases are created on servers that then provide an online interface. There are various processes running in the background there, and in the case of blockchain, it's an option, which is stronger and more long-term or even perpetual. This makes it unbeatable in this role compared to other concepts. Therefore, every museum needs to look at how cultural heritage and cultural assets can be preserved and represented in the Blockchain. This is a new level that has not yet been reached in intensity in recent years. A process of rethinking is now starting again there, and the Saar Museum has now carried this out as a case study to get used to this process. The focus was on things like color fastness, brilliance, and that it really matches the original. When you realize in the process that this works even at such large scales, the idea naturally comes that this is the central way to bring objects into infinite durability. There is now a transformation process here, it has to be clarified how this can also be regulated legally, as well as in accessibility and in control for the individual houses. There, the development is still at the beginning, but will continue to progress. However, the most important step "the start" has already been taken.
More exciting projects at NIFTEE
NIFTEEwants to continue down the path with NFT projects. For them, it has always been very important to show what is possible with technology from the beginning. The path of also working with a museum turns out to be very exciting for them. If you look at Ukraine, for example, where there is a risk that some of the country's cultural assets will be destroyed, blockchain can be used there as a strategy to really preserve the cultural assets so that they continue to be preserved regardless of the country. As sad as that may sound, the approach is the right one. Just as museums need to come up with a metaverse strategy, i.e., a strategy for how to make Web 3 work for them, the same is true for entire regions.
For example, NIFTEE also has a cooperation with the Ahr Valley. In the Ahr valley there was a terrible flood disaster last year and this flood disaster is now being documented. The whole thing is being memorialized as a work of art and the company has worked out a strategy together with the Ahr Valley, which will start implementation next week. There will be appropriately tokenized flood wine, as well as digitized artwork, to which at this point may not yet be revealed more. Flutwein, for those who don't know it, is one of the biggest marketing campaigns for all vintners in the Ahr Valley, whose bottles landed in the water during the flood and thus actually became unsaleable. Now it has become a mad project in itself, which has now been digitized.
It is important for the process to simply take the first step instead of spending weeks or months looking for problems. These can often be cleared up in the ongoing process.
The potential of museums
There is enormous potential in museums. Museums are, also through Corona, but also overall, more difficult to bring into the general consciousness. That is, at the moment, people often don't even think of visiting a museum in their free time. That's why museums have to create occasions to attract visitors. The project with NIFTEE is such an occasion to make people aware of the Saar Museum and the work behind it. Often good work is done that is not seen by many people. Through NFTs, other target groups become aware of museums and a whole new interest is awakened. However, it is important for all museums that both analog and digital never compete with each other and that they enrich each other. When this statute is firmly established in the mind, then a lot can develop.
The good purpose of the project
The money generated by the sale of the NFTs supports a good cause. Specifically: the museum's sponsoring association. For years, this association has been running a project in which school classes from all over the Saarland are given the opportunity to visit the museum. Now this project is being restarted and French school classes, which would not be able to make the trip to the museum without support, are also to be supported. There, the proceeds of the project can be used to finance a
important contribution can be made to invite some school classes to the museum for personal development.
Pure NFT museums? The future of museums
The development of museums goes on and on. Even in the Museum Saar there is already digitally the possibility to walk through the museum in 3D.
More and more often, we hear about the first pure NFT museums opening at different locations. These purely digital museums will definitely play a major role in the future. We are still at the very beginning of what will eventually be called Metaverse. This is emerging piece by piece and NFTs are also building blocks of this. The way of dealing with objects and digital goods as well as with one's own culture is currently changing radically. The possibility is being created to view things worldwide without actually being on site. NFTs can be used to assign cultural assets to a region, an artist and a museum without any doubt. These are very special advantages, because the topic of war art and looted art comes up again and again, even today. Furthermore, the question of whether the document is an original or a forgery can be answered clearly. The blockchain will definitely make a contribution in this regard and offers clear solutions there for the future. All the developments that are happening now in this direction will make a contribution and have a part in determining what the overall picture looks like in the end. This opportunity is also seen in the cooperation between NIFTEE and the Saar Museum, and that is why it is really nice that this is now also happening in the Saar region. In Germany, we are now at the forefront of this.
The vision of the blockchain
The blockchain is a showcase. A showcase that creates occasions and brings things into focus that were not yet known in the museum context in this way and to which access would not otherwise have been found. This storefront can end up making people want to start visiting other places, open their perspective and view of the world, and create experiences elsewhere. The blockchain is an extension of what already exists now and specifies, concretizes, and brings the offer closer, making it an optimal enhancement that builds on what already exists.
Advice and success factors
It can be difficult to break new ground, especially when it comes to non-sector-specific topics, such as the combination of NFT and museums, as is the case in our example. Simon Matzerath and Carmelo Lo Porto conclude with their advice and success factors for such a process for all strategy makers in museums.
Advice from Simon Matzerath
Sometimes it is difficult for museums, but it is always good not to do "the chair circle" first and think about what problems might arise. Basically, real situations should be responded to. That means opening up, breaking new ground, walking these paths, and then gaining and adapting experience. The experimental must be preserved and lived out. It doesn't matter if the tenth experiment goes wrong, because then you've done nine things that have all helped you.
Council of Carmelo Lo Porto
On the one hand, it is important for museums to open up to new possibilities. However, it is also important for people who may not come from the field and have little to do with culture or even contemporary culture to open up to it. Carmelo personally has also learned an incredible amount about art and the conservation of art during the collaboration over the last few weeks. There are exciting worlds out there. So, go to the museums and check them out.