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Here's the First Museum to Buy Art with Bitcoins

The Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art makes art history with the purchase of Harm van den Dorpel's 'Easy Listening.'
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A limited edition screensaver, the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art (MAK), and Bitcoin have united to make art history. This year has already been monumental for the cryptocurrency, be it through sassy spin-offs or intra-company dramaNow, in a move they described as a "new form of collecting in the digital age," MAK in Vienna has become the very first museum to be "decentrally authenticated" to have used Bitcoins to buy art.

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Easy Listeners is a looping OS X screensaver by Post-Internet artist Harm van den Dorpel. Currently on display at the online Bitcoin art exhibition cointemporary.com, 100 digital editions of the piece were created for the interdisciplinary panel, MAK NITE Lab Digital Superposition — The File as an Object. In June, MAK will relocate the work to this year's inaugural Vienna Biennale 2015: Ideas for Change, to be presented in a show called 24/7 — The Human Condition.

Check out a few screenshots of the work below, and head over to cointemporary.com to watch Easy Listeners in full, and, if you're feeling lavish, purchase one of the remaining editions—for the price of 0.12 ฿.

Find more information on the sale on MAK’s website and check out our article on Harm van den Dorpel here.

Via ArtNews

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