Michelle Kuo (curator, MoMA) - MoMA acquires first generative-art NFTs

2022

Artists: Michelle Kuo (curator, MoMA), Casey Reas (artist, acquired), Ian Cheng (artist, acquired) · Year: 2022 · Medium: Institutional acquisition, generative artworks including Casey REAS, Ian Cheng, and others · Substrate: Ethereum and Tezos; varied technical substrates across acquired works · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Museum of Modern Art In 2022 and 2023, the Museum of Modern Art made its first serious institutional acquisitions of generative and on-chain art works beyond the Anadol Unsupervised commission. The acquisitions, curated primarily by Michelle Kuo (Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA) and the museum's digital-art specialists, included works by Casey Reas (specifically pieces from his Ultrachrome series and his Centuries series), Ian Cheng (from the Emissaries trilogy), and several other generative and AI-focused artists. The acquisitions were announced through the museum's standard accessions process rather than as a dedicated digital-art announcement. The curatorial framing is important. MoMA positioned the acquisitions as continuous with its existing holdings in computer art and conceptual practice, pieces were accessioned alongside works by Vera Molnár, Manfred Mohr, and other first-generation figures MoMA had acquired decades earlier. The generative-art acquisitions were not treated as a departure but as the latest iteration of a practice MoMA had been collecting for half a century. The Kuo acquisitions, along with the Anadol Unsupervised commission and the museum's earlier Paik, Knowlton, and Schwartz holdings, mean that MoMA now has a meaningful institutional collection across the full arc of computer art from 1960 to the present. This kind of cross-era depth is rare among American museums and makes MoMA's holdings a primary reference for scholarly work on the field. The acquisitions came during the deepest portion of the crypto winter, which signals that MoMA's commitment was not market-cycle driven. Lore Michelle Kuo, the Marlene Hess Curator at MoMA's Department of Painting and Sculpture, led the museum's first major institutional acquisition of generative-art NFTs in 2023, works by Refik Anadol (Unsupervised, displayed in the museum's lobby), Casey Reas, Ian Cheng, and several others. Kuo had been at MoMA since 2017 and had previously been editor-in-chief of Artforum from 2010 to 2017. Her acquisition argument took roughly two years to negotiate through the museum's internal committees; the central institutional concern was preservation, how MoMA could commit to maintaining these works in perpetuity given the technical-infrastructure dependencies. The Anadol piece in particular required a dedicated technical-staff position within the museum's information-systems department. Kuo has remained at MoMA and continues to lead the institution's digital-art acquisitions. Sources • MoMA, collection additions announcements (2022–2023) • Kuo, Michelle, curatorial essays • Artforum coverage of MoMA accessions