The Shape of Recognition

Museums don’t create importance, they recognize it.

Said another way, an artwork doesn’t become important when it’s acquired by a museum, rather the museum adding the piece to their collection says they understand the importance of the work and in order to properly do their job as cultural stewards and educators, they accept the responsibility of taking care of that work and helping the public understand why it’s important.

By the time an artwork finds its way into a museum’s permanent collection debates about its importance or “is it art?” should be long resolved, though what should be and what is aren’t always the same thing. You’ll still find people arguing about Pollak, Rothko, Duchamp “Just splattered paint” “Anyone could do that” “That’s just a toilet.” Is Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian not art because someone says “that’s just a banana taped to the wall” or is it art in spite of that? The medium, the format, the execution – art is not dictated by these things. Looking back from the future, assertions that NFTs are not art will sound as silly as those arguing a work made with spray paint isn’t as “real” as one made with oils, or that photography can’t be art because anyone can take a photo.

Ultimately there’s no value in engaging in those debates, as the detractors are rarely open to new perspectives. This is a good place to embrace Satoshi’s “I don’t have time to try to convince you” mantra.

In the span of their relatively short existence, CryptoPunks have spent time balancing on all sides of this awkward frame. Speculation, grandstanding, arguments, reviews, skeptics and true believers. Meanwhile the work held up. Collectors treated the 24×24 pixel portraits with the same seriousness they’d give oil on canvas. While outsiders may have doubted, the early visionaries held true.

One early signal that Matt Hall & John Watkinson understood their work was art, and not just a novelty, was evident within their first year. At Kate Vass Galerie in Zürich in 2018, twenty-four CryptoPunks were exhibited in “Perfect & Priceless: Value Systems on the Blockchain,” curated by Georg Bak. Printed, framed, and hung on a wall, the point wasn’t to turn pixels into paper to somehow make them “real.” It was to say that this project belonged in a gallery context from day one.

Recognition usually lags behind practice. New mediums need advocates who are willing to build before the rest of the world agrees. That’s not marketing or shilling, it’s how canon gets updated. I’m reminded of Derek Siver’s talk about the first follower and how movements are made not by a single leader, but by someone having the guts to stand up and join in.

Collectors deserve credit for keeping the signal clean while the noise was loud. They did the early work and risked looking ridiculous, they told the stories, documented it, built the shared knowledge when it would have been easier to treat it all as hype and forget it. They held on. That record matters because it creates something institutions can actually rely on: evidence, context, and continuity.

When museums acquire work, they do more than validate it. They take responsibility for it. Acquisition turns a private obsession into a public object. It pulls the work out of pure market logic and into a framework built for stewardship: cataloging, conservation planning, research access, scholarship, exhibition, and loans. It creates an official trail that future curators, historians, and students can cite without having to reconstruct the story from scratch.

That shift changes what becomes possible. It invites serious and thoughtful writing, not just passing commentary. It makes room for the work to sit beside earlier movements that were also born on the edges of technology, design, and conceptual art. It gives other institutions cover to act, and gives donors and collectors a clear path to place important works where they can be seen, studied, and preserved.

The speed of the progression is the point. In less than a decade, CryptoPunks moved from a forward-looking gallery show in Zürich to the kinds of institutions that define modern art for the public. That is not a small turn. It’s a signal that the conversation has changed, and that the gates are open for deeper institutional engagement. Curators take bigger chances. Exhibitions get smarter. Collections get broader. The work becomes harder to ignore, and easier to understand on its own terms.

Museums don’t hand out meaning. They make meaning durable. When they acquire CryptoPunks, they’re not rubber-stamping a trend. They’re acknowledging that a native digital artwork, distributed through networks and owned through code, is part of the story art history now has to tell.