 This is the state Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The former winter home of Russian tsars is today the largest museum in the world by gallery space, with over 3 million works of art. Earlier this year, the Hermitage made headlines when it sold digital copies of five masterpieces in the form of non-fungible tokens for almost $450,000. In November, the museum launched its very first NFT exhibition located entirely in a digital space. We spoke to Dmitry Azirkov, head of the Contemporary Art Department at the Hermitage, to discover why one of the world's most important art institutions is embracing NFT technology and what that means for the future of crypto and art. When the NFT boom was about to arrive, it was the December of 2020, when I learned that it's all coming. I realized that we have to deal with the NFT format. For me, it's a format that helps us to keep the ownership and the whole history of the provenance that is very important for art in general, because all auction houses, all museums need this. So when we talk about NFT art, there's contemporary artists who are plunged into the NFT technology, for them NFT is also the tool to deliver their artwork to the market and to receive their royalties. In August 2021, the Hermitage partnered with Binance to hold its first NFT auction. Five digital copies of the museum's masterpieces, including works by Leonardo Da Vinci and Vincent Van Gogh, were sold for roughly 450,000 by Binance USD. So the copies were signed by the Hermitage director and the copies that were on market, they're basically new artworks, because they are, you know, the image of existed works and they have signature of the Hermitage director that makes them new creations. In the wake of the auction's success, the Hermitage launched its very first NFT exhibition called The Ethereal Either. The exhibition is entirely digital and can be visited for free on a dedicated website. And the whole point was we have to keep this works inside the virtual reality, inside the digital world, and in order to see them, we have to digitalize ourselves. So we have to create our own avatars, better to put the glasses and through the glasses you can come to this world and there you see this artwork. We used the real space of the museum that we had exact copy of, but this space we totally transformed thanks to our digital architects. And in the exhibition you can see different rooms with different design of one in the same space. The problem of this kind of room is a kind of, you know, small snuff box, a box of diamonds. You can't really touch it because you can't drill the wall, you can't glue to the wall, you can't really, you know, you can only pass through this doors and, you know, without touching anything. In the virtual world you can do anything, you can play with artworks, you can make them interactive, you can add data to it. The Ethereal Either exhibition is the result of the Hermitage's partnerships with major NFT platforms such as SuperAir and OpenSea. Among the 38 native digital pieces are a number of classics such as Cryptokitties and Cryptopunks, but also newer pieces that reflect on the very nature of NFT as an art medium. So one of them is TerraZero works dealing with the nature. It's an NFT that once a year calls the center of monitoring of the climate into the world and when the climate level rises up in two degrees the work is set to burn itself, means to send itself to an existing address. When you buy this kind of NFT you feel yourself responsible that the climate is not unchanged. So NFT is a kind of bump in itself that can explode in case something goes wrong and you can lose it. The Hermitage's involvement in the NFT space isn't about market hype and speculation but rather about the artistic value that this technology can create. That is why the NFTs on display are not for sale for the duration of the exhibition. Now with this boom of NFTs it's so much related to money and to market that people don't see the difference where the art ends and where the market begins. So my idea was to take all the existing works that we made a selection of from the market and to put them into the museum and to have a look at what remains in them as art. Is there any art there or what we like in them, what we value in them, it's only money? Like we stand now in front of Leonardo that's so much venerated artwork through centuries and it ended up into this golden frame in this room and we'll be the same with the NFTs in 200 years. Which NFT will remain? Which one we take to the future? So that's the question. After taking its first steps in the NFT world the Hermitage will continue to explore the possibilities offered by this new art form. The museum is planning to create a fully digital branch in the metaverse that will be called the Celestial Hermitage. As I said for me it's the very beginning of the NFT history. I think we all are moving to the digital era and we are almost there and the digital twins will be following us in any way, in any direction. We definitely want to build the Celestial Hermitage entirely because that's the future of any museum to build the Celestial Twin that you can visit. Will blockchain technology really revolutionize art as we know it? Will NFTs appear in art history books? It's still too early to say. But after seeing cryptokitties alongside Leonardo da Vinci's works among the Hermitage exhibits we think the trend is going in that direction.