In the Hermitage, a visitor tried to “steal” a painting from a virtual NFT exhibition – Bits Media

The State Hermitage Museum opened the first virtual NFT exhibition in its history called “Invisible Ether”. However, on the very first day of the exhibition, a visitor tried to “steal” the work.

As reported on the Hermitage website, 10 November the ceremony took place opening of the exhibition “Invisible Ether”. This is the first virtual exhibition of the Hermitage, which will be available until 10 December. The Invisible Ether project includes 38 works, located in the interiors, created on the basis of the Exchange building - the architectural ensemble of the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island.

QR codes lead to the exhibition, placed at the entrance to the Hermitage and on the facade of the Exchange building. You can access the gallery from the project website, and from the Masters digital platform, using a computer, smartphone or augmented reality glasses. but, as reported by the Hermitage Department of Contemporary Art, on the very first day of the exhibition, an attempt was made to steal a virtual art object.

“One of the guests tried to take away the painting, but our colleagues prevented the incident in time and installed the exhibit in place.”, - the message says.

According to exhibition curator Dmitry Ozerkov, what happened is explained by a “bug” - the painting was not fixed on the wall of the virtual room and they tried to take it out of the gallery unintentionally.

"It turned out, that some work is not assigned, and, respectively, it was removed from the wall by one of the users", – commented Ozerkov.

The exhibition “Invisible Ether” is the second step of the Hermitage to popularize the possibilities of NFTs in the Russian museum environment, after the sale of digital copies of paintings from the Hermitage collection on the OpenSea cryptocurrency platform.