Prague the center of the cryptoworld: Non-Fungible Castle-G.cz
Prague goes in digital art
An event named Non-Fungible Castle is an exhibition of NFTs connected with an international conference, which will take place in October in the Lobkowicz Palace at Prague Castle. An event that will bring to Prague top experts and personalities from the world of increasingly popular digital art, which aims to discover the possibilities of connecting culture, cryptocurrencies and modern technologies, as well as sharing history with visions of the future and trends of the 21st century.
The five-day exhibition in the Lobkowicz Palace, which is open to visitors free of charge and will culminate in an international conference broadcast online, is unique in the Czech Republic. It is organized by the Lobkowicz Collections, a cultural institution that manages art objects collected over the centuries by the Lobkowicz family. The Non-Fungible Castle exhibition will present works that do not yet exist in the world and can only be owned in digital form. Both the originals created by the Lobkowicz collections and the works of other artists, such as the work Stay free from the controversial Edward Snowden. Another of the exhibited pieces will be music composed by Anna Maria Vilemina, Countess of Althann, who has not been played for 250 years. At the time of its creation, it was not appropriate for a woman to compose music. Another example is a painting by Paolo Veronese, which hides another dimension, visible under an X-ray.
“But broken tokens aren’t just about buying digital art. The owner of the NFT can also be the patron of the project, who wants to show that he supported a thing that makes sense, “says William Rudolf Lobkowicz, who organizes the whole event. An essential part of the program is a conference with international participation, which operates at the end of the program, and is already attended by leading experts from the ranks of gallerists, NFT market experts, creators, investors, technology experts and representatives of communities organized in the digital world. The four panels will discuss a number of topics and issues related to NFT, but also cryptocurrencies. The event has the ambition to verify whether it makes sense to connect traditional art with modern artistic trends in the virtual world. It is actually an experiment of its kind. How can high culture help and enrich the online world, and what can new forms of digital art bring to “classical” art? Can cultural heritage work with blockchain and discover something that has a quality beyond the virtual world? The event will also include auctions of selected NFTs, and the proceeds will go to restaurant projects of monuments and works of art from the Lobkowicz collections.
The exhibition takes place in the Imperial Hall of the Lobkowicz Palace at Prague Castle from Monday 11 to Friday 15 October, the conference there on Saturday 16 October 2021. Tickets for the conference are available at www.nfcastle.com. The press conference to open the exhibition will take place on Monday 11 October from 9:00 in the Imperial Hall of the Lobkowicz Palace.
About NFTs
Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is a revolutionary concept of digital identifiers used to certify the authenticity and ownership of an asset. These can be practically anything, from images to music to text, but they only exist in the digital world. An absolutely crucial element for them is the unadulterated confirmation of their ownership, which is entered into a decentralized database of transparent online transactions, the so-called blockchain.
About Lobkowicz’s collections
Since 2002, Lobkowicz Collections, ops has been managing the art collections of the Lobkowicz family, which are among the oldest, largest and most valuable family collections in Europe. They include unique works of art, music and historical weapons. The history of some collection items reaches more than a thousand years. The collections also include a library with more than 65,000 volumes and an extensive family archive, the contents of which demonstrate the extraordinary position of many members of the family on the European political and cultural scene and also testify to intensive patronage activities that have lasted for generations. In the middle of the last century, the Lobkowicz collections experienced a turbulent period when they were confiscated twice in quick succession, first by the Nazi and then by the Communist regime. The adoption of restitution laws in the early 1990s made the family mostly art objects, which they track and collect back into their hands. Shortly afterwards, for the first time in history, these gems were made available to the general public. A large part of objects from the Lobkowicz collections is exhibited in two permanent exhibitions – in the Lobkowicz Palace at Prague Castle and at the chateau in Nelahozeves.