The Centre for Museums hosted its first talk ‘Animating the Inanimate’ with Prof. A. Damodaran. Professor Damodaran has been faculty with the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore since 2005. He has also held academic assignments at several universities. He has recently published a book, Managing Arts in Times of Pandemics and Beyond. The talk focuses on the pandemic-induced changes in the concept of art and museums. It also touches upon virtual space technologies and blockchains in the domain of museums and art.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the conversation:

• Impact of Covid-19 on art and museums: Before the pandemic, digital art was not as established as traditional art. The pandemic has given a boost and has allowed digital art to be placed in the mainstream. With lockdown, museums have also changed their outlook — rather than just displays and curated walks, virtual exhibitions and audio-visual productions are also now place. In certain museums like MOMA, even 3-D technologies are used.

• Concept of Blockchains, NFT and museums: Blockchains are nothing but a digital ledger. It cannot be altered as it is a distributed community. In terms of museums, it can be used to keep track of accessions, financial situations, viewed objects, maintenance records of the antiques and so on. It is not meant to store large data but to protect data of critical value. In an aesthetic sense, the relationship between blockchain and artworks is to be able to monetise the works. The non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the monetising part, giving provenance to the artwork and a sense of authority to the artists.

• Difference between virtual museums and virtual museum visits: Another post-Covid effect which allows people to virtually visit museums from all over the world, i.e. virtual museum visits. The virtual museum is creating a museum out of mind and using virtual reality to populate it with digital art and putting it online.

• Creation of art in the Metaverse: In Metaverse, our avatar is there but not us. The avatar can go to a canvas and create a new artwork but essentially it is in 3-D. At the same time, it can also take a lot of real objects and convert them into 3-D animate, much more than what it might be in the real world.

Creative capital can be best expressed in terms of museums but there are a lot of museums and galleries that find it difficult to surge towards technological changes, as still the cultural sector is at a nascent stage and technological literacy is low.