Collecting Caravaggio, Van Gogh and Monet through NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) is one of the most disruptive and bizarre occurrence in today's art world, along with Beeple's ongoing auction at Christie's, offering a purely digital artwork (NFT) first of its kind in the history. 

The booming of NFTs artworks has very much diminished the conventional concept and experience of art collecting, as if the full cycle of art collecting no longer exists, only the transaction of the ownership matters. When art collecting is not about the physical possession and appreciation any more, does it mean we could collect anything we want, as long as we're rich in our digital wallets?

​Established in 2021, Global Art Museum (GAM), verified by Opensea, claims that they transform historic Old Masters into blockchain-secured unique art called NFTs​

​As we can find in the website of GAM, it has initiated 4 art initiatives until 8 March, representing 4 world-renowned public museums: Rijks Museum in Netherlands, Birmingham Museums in the UK; Art Institute of Chicago and Cleveland Museum of Art, in the USA.  Ranging from old masters, Renaissance to Neoclassicism, invaluable masterpieces from those museum collections have been transferred by GAM to the cryptosphere, with their unique NFT to represent their namesakes in museum. Instead of conventionally collecting a Van Gogh painting, you are paying to collect a series of code, which signifies your ownership of the NFT art or NFT image of Van Gogh.

Simply NO. The collections that GAM choose to transform are all under a Creative Commons Zero Licence (CC0) . It is a nonprofit organization that helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world’s pressing challenges. The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighbouring rights, to the extent allowed by law. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Failing to hear any voices from museums’ side, along with the ambiguous reply to the public’s question from GAM, we suspect that GAM has not reached any official agreements with museums beforehand. To make an NFT, all GAM needs is just a digital file (JPG, PNG, GIF, etc.), downloadable from the museum e-sources with fully open access. The image must be minted, and a computational process that registers it on the blockchain.

What GAM has been doing is to make the most use of CC0, transforming a huge range of high-quality digital resources into NFTs. In this case, it seems more appropriate to call these works as “images” rather than “art”. 
 
Compared to most of the digital art traded in NFTs, which signifies the current frenzy that art buying as speculation and investment within the art market, GAM has restored the emotional value (buy what you love) and aesthetic value to the art to some extent. As it claims:
 
"Secured by blockchain, all artwork provenance is documented, thus preventing duplication. The artwork can be viewed by anyone around the world (transparency) and can be transferred to anyone around the world and tracked on blockchain (accountability). Every owner of the artwork will be handed a Certificate of Authenticity. Any revenue derived from sales or rental will be shared with the museum. Thus, your purchases will help to support museums financially in today's difficult COVID-19 pandemic era."
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Currently, this 1887 Self-Portrait by Vincent van Gogh was offered at highest 0.02 WETH or $35.74, though it has been sold yet. All museum NFT artworks are open for bidding, which is also part of the "decentralising" feature of the cryptoshere. OpenSea, on which GAM operated is a do-it-yourself (DIY) minting platform that allows creators easily mint their own NFTs without charging for an Ethereum gas fee.
 
Among the over 120 artworks offered by GAM, only 11 pieces have received bidding offers. While Art Institute of Chicago received the most offers for its impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, the color woodblock print Twilight at Nakanocho by Japanese artist Okumura Masanobu (奥村政信,1686-1764) from the Cleveland Museum of Art Collection received the highest price, $349.58. No trading has been made successful so far. 

However, the few biddings still let us have a chance to sneak peek at buyer’s attitudes towards the transformed traditional art: the preference for the renowned names and the obsession with uniqueness.
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11 NFTs Museum Artworks with Bidding Offers

Highly active on Twitter, re-tweeting, interacting with museum official accounts as well as various NFT-related accounts, GAM is making efforts to broaden its influence and gain authoritative recognition at present. It's still too early for large and traditional cultural institutions to make a response to NFTs art yet, one thing for sure, most museum audience is suffering from digital fatigue caused by the endless lockdown. So might be yes, but not soon.

By Yunru Long and Lang Xiao 

Contact USThank you for reading.  Feel free to reach out if you need any advice and services in cross-cultural communication. ARTouch Consulting is a boutique cross-cultural PR and digital communication agency, specialising in arts, culture and luxury lifestyle, ​connecting brands with vibrant Chinese audiences and consumers. We provide A to Z PR and digital communication solutions.

Lang.Xiao@artouchconsulting.com

Accelerated by the pandemic, Chinese museums have proactively embraced the rapidly-expanding livestream platforms. By late 2020, their user-base numbered 617 million people, accounting for more than 60% of total Internet users in the country. 

Apart from dominant apps Douyin and Kuaishou, Alibaba is also forging into the market, not only through Taobao Live e-commerce livestreaming but also Fliggy, specialising in cultural & tourism live-streaming.  In May 2020, Fliggy, one-stop travel app launched a campaign among international museums, namely “A Virtual Tour to European Museums”. Up to February 2021, participants include The Palace of Versailles, The British Museum, The Prado Museum, The Musee du Louvre, The Centre Pompidou, The Musée d’Orsay and The Natural History Museum (London). For the majority, it was their livestream debut in China! How was it? Here are our observations and thoughts!

The nature of livestream has amplified the language barriers between Chinese audience and international museums. 

• Consecutive Interpretation 

3 of the 7 museums chose consecutive interpretation, such as the British Museum and the Natural History Museum. Although consecutive interpretation can create a strong atmosphere of being live, the prolonged experiences will increase the risk of losing the audience. For example, when livestreamed in the photography exhibition at Natural History Museum,  the host took 16 seconds to make an initial introduction, while the translator took similar amount of time to complete the translation. However, the camera failed to use visual language to make up the prolonged experience, but just filmed the host waiting for the completion of the translation.

• Simultaneous Interpretation 

2 of the 7 museums chose simultaneous interpretation, such as Palace of Versailles and the Louvre Museum. Three museums in France- Palace of Versailles, the Louvre Museum and Musée d’Orsay, appointed the same French interpreter to deliver the Mandarin translation simultaneously. Even though the simultaneous interpretation has much improved the prolonged translation experiences, the tone of translation restricts the full nature of livestream, which is casual, intimate, live communication. 

• Livestream in Mandarin directly 

2 of the 7 museums chose to livestream in Mandarin directly. During the Centre Pompidou livestream, the host, a Chinese Guide-conférencière from the museum, delivered a smooth and native introduction of the Pompidou collection in her mother tongue. The language has made the audience feel relatable immediately.

On average, each of the Fliggy livestream embedded 26 products. Apart from the British Museum having included some of their licensed products, the majority of the products were from the category of TOURISM related to the destination, such as visa service, e-tickets, flights booking, hotel booking, guided-tours, etc. Although people can tell what products were from Fliggy, what were from the museums, it's unavoidable to make association between the listed products with the museum brands.   

To our surprise, it is the first that we observed that ALCOHOL brands were promoted during a museum live-streaming. In the Musée d’Orsay livestream, Hennessy and Martell were on the top 2 in the product list. And Martell official Weibo reposted the Fliggy announcement of the livestream. 

The official Chinese social media accounts of  international museums generally promote upcoming livestreams on their agenda. Without an official account, Natural History Museum livestream was promoted via other accounts of supporters or collaborators, such as the Weibo of The British Embassy in Beijing, British Consulate General Guangzhou, and a few tourism KOLs or influencers.

After the livestream, it is also important to use social media, including RED and others, to collect feedback and generate further discussion and interest among the existing followers and the newly-converted followers. Social media can also make the most use of the livestream. For example, The Louvre Museum re-edited the livestream video and posted on Weibo grouped into 4 different sections, which hit 1,158 reposts in total.

By Lanyi Jiang - Social media manager

Thank you for reading.  Feel free to reach out if you need any advice and services in cross-cultural communication. ARTouch Consulting is a boutique cross-cultural PR and digital communication agency, specialising in arts, culture and luxury lifestyle, ​connecting brands with vibrant Chinese audiences and consumers. We provide A to Z PR and digital communication solutions.

Lang.Xiao@artouchconsulting.com

This month we've been tracking the active level of each account, mainly by the number of new posts and usage of Instagram Story. Although nearly 1/3 of the accounts are dormant, Minsheng Art Museum was almost posting daily, generating 28 posts and several while the museum was still in closure.

Zero new posts accounted for 32%; 1-5 new posts accounted for 22%; 6-10 new posts accounted for 25%; 11+ new posts accounted for 21%

The average number of followers of Chinese museum accounts increased from 5,485 of last month to 5,676.

On April 24th, 2020, a limited edition of 500 Crystalised Pikuchu by Daniel Arsham sold out within hours raising overUS$1 million exclusively on China's WeChat Mini-Program.

With a user base of approximately 800 million people in 2016, WeChat launched Mini-Program, small applications embedded and functioning within the WeChat ecosystem, providing advanced features such as e-commerce, games and task management, etc. Three years later, monthly active users of Mini-Program hit 300 million, generating CNY¥800 billion (about US$113 billion) of transactions in 2019, along with the rapid growth of WeChat Payment service. Today, WeChat Payment executes over 1 billion commercial transitions every day, serving over 500 million merchants selling products and services of all kinds, including of course, the arts.

Mini-Program, with the magic to convert audiences or readers of WeChat accounts directly into consumers, seems to be the answer for many. In the art world, Daniel Arsham, a contemporary American visual artist, who is engaged with elevating the retail experiences of the world's most valued and known fashion brands, such as DIOR, RIMOWA and UNIQLO, through his branded art series Future Relic, has made quite a splash on Mini-Program recently.

With 45k followers on Chinese Weibo (posting since November 2018), Daniel Arsham landed on WeChat by announcing his new initiative Archive Editions to his followers on Weibo and Instagram. According to Arsham, Archive Editions is a platform selling limited editions by him or his fellow artists exclusively in China. The debut of the platform presented 500 editions of Crystalized Pikachu at CNY¥14,200 each plus CNY¥ 200 shipping fee.

Thanks to the collaboration with the world's most famous brands and his first solo exhibition in China at Shanghai How Art Museum in 2019, Archive Editions' inaugural online shopping scheduled on April 24th (10 days after the announcement) was very much anticipated among his mainly millennial Chinese fans. Daniel Arsham was also very busy with all kinds of promotions to maximise the sales and impact of the platform, from live-streaming with Vogue Business In China on Weibo and Yizhibo, to an unboxing video preview with Hypebeast Weibo Story, as well as using his own Weibo account. 

The interface of ​Archive Editions is no different from most Mini-program shops, including the function of shopping cart, payments, coupons, delivery tracking and customer services contact. The home page of the shop spotlights the star product and all the related information to make the customer appreciate the rarity, exclusivity and authenticity, such as a pair of "handling gloves included" and the "holographic label" and "numbered".

It came as no surprise that the 500 items were sold out very quickly, which means ​​Archive Editions hit  CNY¥7,100,000  (roughly US$1 million) revenue. However, the poor shopping experience is unignorable. 

• ​The Mini-program suspended the service roughly just 1 hour after the release time due to technical problems.
• Customers were waiting on the payment page for over 30 minutes or even an hour, but ultimately were told payment failed.
• Customers questioned the fairness and transparency of such sales, complaining that the products ended up in the hands of speculators, Internet bots, and privileged people through priority access, rather than real fans.​
• Overselling also happened. Even though customers were refunded in the end, huge disappointment was unavoidable.​

Technology capacity, transparency level, and instant communication with customers are the three key aspects to the success of a Mini-program-based shopping event.

1. Waiting long for limited editions is common, but if the long-waiting is invalid due to technical problems, it makes people desperate. Make sure to hire an extra-strong IT team or partner with an existing successful shopping platform.
2. Customers understand the pre-heat of a sale usually involves influencers and celebrities accessing the product ahead of the general public. However, the actual purchasing process should be clearly-numbered and transparent. It is essential to make sure the announced edition number is dedicated to the general public and excludes the influencers' giveaways or the pre-access. 
3. Instant communication is essential when a problem occurs during the sale, using all channels to update your customers. If mistakes are made, apologise and offer a positive solution or compensation. 

With more than 500 million people actively swiping and scrolling on Instagram every day, the world's most eminent cultural institutions have embraced Instagram from its beginning. Leading museums, like the MET, Musée du Louvre, MoMA and the British Museum, diligently present their collections, spread their core values to, as well as socialise with their millions of followers from all over the world.  

Although Instagram is blocked in China Mainland, many of the most active Chinese museums manage to register and operate an official Instagram account. Because of the different media landscape in China, Chinese museums spend most of their efforts on WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, RED and other Chinese social media platforms.  However, the adoption of Instagram by Chinese museums reveals their demand for international recognition. There is no doubt, Instagram offers a huge potential for Chinese museums to interact and engage with international audiences, cultural institutions and overseas Chinese.

ARTouch Consulting monitors the Instagram performance of 28 Chinese public and private museums, and introduces the first of its kind "Chinese Museums Instagram Index".

Timeline: M Woods (Beijing), Times Museum (Guangzhou),  Minsheng Art Museum (Shanghai) and K11 Art Foundation (multi-locations) were the early-adopters, making their first Instagram posts in 2014. The latecomers are the X Museum (Beijing, open in May 2020) , Today Art Museum (Beijing) and MoCA Shanghai.

Museum locations: Shanghai accounted for 46%, followed by Beijing with 29%, and the rest from cities like Nanjing and Guangzhou.

Private vs Public: Among the 28 museums tracked, 79% are private museums. This is easy to understand. Firstly, the decision-making process in private museum is much less complicated; secondly, the owners and the employees of private museums usually are with stronger international visions and overseas background, and it's also likely that they are Instagram users themselves. 

Language:  Among the 28 museums, 79% only use English, while 14% use both English and Chinese, with the rest using Chinese but English hashtags. It is very clear that their target are global audiences. ​

Followers: K11 Art Foundation is of the most followers at 37,000  (with 1,070 posts, 2-3 posts weekly), while Long Museum Chongqing only has 34 followers  (only with 4 posts, stopped updating in 2016). The average followers level is at 5,513.

Followers engagement: We are looking at the percentage of followers who like or comment on the new posts over the month. The average level is around 5%.

Frequency: 39% of the museums made no update over the last month, while Power Station of Art was super productive, generating 24 posts. The average is posting 4 new contents each month.

Usage of IGTV and Story: The usage of IGTV and Story was not very high, with 89% museums never used IGTV and under 50% museums not used Story, this might partially due to the inconvenience of syndicating Instagram simultaneously in Mainland China.

K11 Art Foundation is the only one verified Instagram account among our Index. All posts are in both English and Traditional Chinese. Because of the multi-location nature of the foundation, it usually covers the contents related to exhibitions happening across their locations inside and outside of Mainland China. 

With 15,000 followers, M Woods is one of the most popular and active Chinese museum account on Instagram. On April 8th, M Woods announced their virtual museum on Animal Crossing —— Nintendo's biggest hit of the lockdown, riding on the phenomenal popularity of the console game globally. With hashtags including #stayhome and #animalcrossing, as well as 10 cute images of their virtual museum on Animal Crossing, the post won 527 likes and 51 comments. Again, the is might also be attributed to the co-founder of the museum, Wanwan Lei, who was educated in the US and radiates her influence on Chinese social media as well as Instagram to over 4.8 million followers all together. 
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​X Museum is the first Chinese museum which launched their official instagram account (December 2019) before the official opening of their museum  (scheduled in March 2020, now postponed to May 2020 due to Covid-19). This is partially attributed to its founder Michael Xufu Huang, who is extremely sophisticated and connected in the international art scene and also an Instagram influencer with over 108,000 followers. On March 6th, X Museum posted the launch of "the first naked eye 3D virtual museum in China" with a very Instagram-friendly and visually intriguing video, which hit 1, 091 views, at nearly 50% of follower engagement rate.

ARTouch Consulting will publish Chinese Museums Instagram Monthly Active Top 5, examining the monthly amount of new posts, followers growth rate, followers conversion rate per post as well as followers engagement rate.

Stay tuned. Until next ARTouch Insights time. Stay safe and well.
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Is your museum ready to turn curators to live-streamers, or even retailers? Here are the most pioneering answers from peers in China. 

China is digitally transforming at an unmatched rate, especially during the current mass quarantine when online communications and entertainment is more on demand than ever. In the last two weeks, the ever-popular live-streaming has swept and overwhelmed the museum world nationwide,  public and private. 

Taobao Live, a live-streaming arm of e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, witnessed a great leap during the lockdown of the country. According to Taobao，the number of live broadcast rooms grew 700% in January to February 2020. Over this Easter Weekend,  the 6th Vol. of Taobao Yunyou or Taobao Cloud Tour provided a live-streaming relay, joining hands with nearly a dozen museums, including Dunhuang Academy China, Fosun Foundation, How Art Museum, K11 Guangzhou, Red Brick Art Museum and teamLab Borderless Shanghai, etc. The live- streaming slot of each of the cultural institutions was scheduled with an hour gap between one another (see picture below), and the institutions were given the rehearsal or testing opportunity before the live-streaming day. With the push of Taobao, the campaign brought  around 80,000-90,000 viewers to each of the live-streaming sessions.

Q: Who are the live-streamers?
A: Anyone from museum curators, to museum members, or museum staff from public program departments, or museum shop assistants. It can be one person, or two-persons,  or a variety show.​ Fosun Foundation invited one member to co-host the live-streaming with their staff; while How Art Museum and Red Brick Art Museum both had curators in front of the cameras.

Q: How to utilize the hours-long live-streaming?
A: Anything from special exhibition tours, to museum architecture and garden tours, or a walk and talk in the museum shop, and even having afternoon tea streamed on screen. 

Q: What's the process?
A: Greeting and Introduction →  Schedule Announcement (including lucky draw, gifts) → Touring → Product/Membership Ad Placement → Interactive Chatting → Gifting→ Touring → on a LOOP ... During each of the live-streaming, there were about 15 to 30 products introduced by the host, time-based special discounts were offered too.

Q: What are the gifts?
A: Ranging from special exhibition tickets to membership, limited-edition tote bags, licensed products, artist's editions, afternoon tea vouchers, etc. 

1. Make sure you've got the right gadgets! You need video STABILIZER, you might need extra lighting, and you definitely need ultra-fast INTERNET!!! The technical quality of IMAGE is the KEY to a successful live-streaming. No one would stay to be tortured by the desperate "loading". If the connection speed and quality is poor, then it is "DEAD-Streaming" rather than a "LIVE-Streaming". 

2. The quality of the SOUND is equally crucial, which means you'd better have professional MICROPHONES. Also, make sure there is no other disturbing background music to distract your long-distance viewers, who can't contextualise the sound naturally from afar.

3. Lots of INTERACTION please. This is the main element differentiating  live-streaming from a video. If there is no simultaneous interaction, it is a waste of people's efforts to make such an online appointment happen.  Two way communication, also read and respond to people's comments and react.  Lots of gifts!!!

4. Good balance of the role as educator and salesperson! Keep reminding yourself of the nature of museums! People are buying products from the museums not because museum is a department store, but because it holds the knowledge, the art and the rarity of human excellence. Do NOT sacrifice the museum brand to drive sales.

Are you ready to give it a go? Please share it if you feel it's useful. Until next ARTouch Insights Time! Stay safe and well.

Lang Xiao

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a substantial impact on every aspect of our society. Following China, western cultural institutions have witnessed a wave of temporary closure in March 2020 to contain the spread of the disease. Most of those institutions made announcement of closure on their official social media channels, such as Instagram, along with messages of "more online initiatives and resources to follow". 

How are about their official Chinese social media? A lot of the world's Leading international cultural institutions have established and operated their official Weibo and WeChat accounts for years, including the MET, the British Museum and the Louvre. How did those accounts react since their overseas premises announced temporary closure? Any lessons to learn? Here are our observations over the Period of March 13-27 2020.

Key Summary Points:

• Almost all major western cultural institutions' official Chinese social media reacted promptly to the temporary closure by announcing the news
• The MET embraced a new social media platform - Pindoudou, e-commerce platform allowing users to participate in group buying deals, through a live-streaming shopping event with a few other Chinese museums, to promote museums' licensed products. 
• Apart from the V&A, very few of them announced online initiatives or campaigns during the period of museum closure. The Asian Art Museum and MoMA also tweaked their language to make the contents reflecting the current situation. It is essential for social media to be current and respond creatively and without much delay.
• Concepts similar to "online museum" or "museum cloud tour" are no longer new to the sophisticated Chinese audience. However, it might still work well if the contents and the online strategies are and tailored for online audience with an impressive, convenient, encouraging experiences.

Until next ARTouch Insights Time! Stay safe and well.
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