Onchain at Beaubourg: The Pompidou’s Digital Art Committee
The Centre Pompidou launches a five-year Digital Art Committee of French and international patrons, with particular attention to onchain works and new forms of generative art.
The Centre Pompidou has created a "Comité Art Numérique," a Digital Art Committee set up for five years, from 2026 to 2031. The patronage scheme is meant to bring together French and international patrons who want to support the institution's commitment to digital art, with Ismail Tazi and Benjamin Gross named as founding patrons. The committee will fund acquisitions for the collection of the Centre Pompidou-Musée national d'art moderne, and support publications, research programmes, exhibitions and conservation. The museum says it will pay particular attention to works created and inscribed on the blockchain, known as onchain, as well as to new forms of generative art.
The interest runs deep. In 1975 the Centre Pompidou set up a computer lab for artists and the public, the Atelier de Recherches en Techniques Avancées (A.R.T.A.), and its programme has included Les Immatériaux (1985), Passages de l'image (1990), La Revue Virtuelle (1993 to 1996) and the Mutations/Créations cycle (2018 to 2022). In 2023 it became the first museum of modern and contemporary art to acquire a group of works linked to the blockchain. Recent additions include works by Robert Alice, Rhea Myers and Anna Ridler, along with the gift of a major group of generative works by Tyler Hobbs.
Three exhibitions in the museum's Constellation programme draw on this side of the collection: Computer Worlds at Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum in Shanghai (September 24, 2026 to February 14, 2027), Unstable Media in the 21st Century at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (November 20, 2026 to May 2, 2027), and the online show Nos chimères sont-elles ce qui nous ressemble le mieux ? (September 14 to December 13, 2026), made with KADIST, in which ten artists look at large language models and generative AI.
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