107. Crypto and Museums Part 1
Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.
In November 2021, an extremely rare first printing of the U.S. Constitution was put up for auction at Sotheby's in New York, attracting a unique bidder: ConstitutionDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. This group had formed just weeks earlier with the sole purpose of acquiring the Constitution – and would not have been possible without crypto technology.
While museums and crypto don't commonly coexist at the moment, they may increasingly intersect in the future. They actually address similar fundamental issues: trust and historical accuracy. Both can help answer the question: what really happened? To explore this overlap, we speak with Nik Honeysett, CEO of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative in San Diego, who helps trace the story of ConstitutionDAO's bid for the Constitution. We explore key crypto concepts like blockchains and smart contracts, and how they might apply to the wider museum world – particularly around questions of provenance and institutional trust.
Image: Nicolas Cage in 2004's National Treasure. Supporters of ConstitutionDAO drew parallels between his character's fictional theft of the Declaration of Independence and the DAO's real-life attempt to purchase the Constitution.
Gallery Continues 🎒
In this episode, we use the British Museum as the example of the ‘power era’ of museums. The story of the museum’s early years centers around collector Hans Sloane, who assembled an encyclopedic collection of specimens and objects from all around the world. Funded by his marriage into the enslaving plantocracy of Jamaica and aided by Britain’s rising colonial power and global reach, Sloane’s collection became the basis for the British Museum. In episode 39 of Museum Archipelago, James Delbourgo, author of Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum discusses how Sloane’s idea of universal public access to his collections is still the standard today.
Archipelago at the Movies🍿 Museums in King of the Hill
The artificial leg of Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna has been held by an Illinois museum for over a century. On Season 2, Episode 18 of King of the Hill, "The Final Shinsult", the Arlen Museum plays host to the war trophy as the last "leg" of the tour before it is repatriated to Mexico, and some of the characters are not happy about it.
Today on Archipelago at the Movies, Ashira Morris and I discuss how museums are presented in the King of the Hill universe, with a focus on "The Final Shinsult" and Season 3, Episode 18's "Love Hurts and So Does Art".
