The Austrian Museum of Applied Arts has made history by being the first museum ever to purchase an artwork with a cryptocurrency

Art history has been made.  The Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art (MAK) has purchased an online installation entitled Event Listeners, making it the first ever museum to make an art purchase with Bitcoins.

The installation, by post-internet artist Harm van den Dorpel, is an algorithmically-generated OS X screen saver. MAK has purchased one of 100 digital editions of the piece created for the interdisciplinary panel, MAK NITE Lab Digital Superposition — The File as an Object. The significance of the screensaver is, in van den Dorpel's words, that "they are completely useless, and might therefore exist in the same space as art."

Post-internet art is integrating itself into people’s lives in innovative ways.  In State of the Arts we explored how the movement was breaking out of the screen and into galleries; MAK’s acquisition of Event Listeners takes this to the next level. Not only are galleries making post-internet art part of their collection, they’re acquiring it through completely new, and digital, means.

If cryptocurrency artwork happens to be your kind of thing, you can purchase one of the remaining editions - for the price of 0.12 ฿ - right here.