There's more to museums than meets the eye. That's because even the largest, like New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, typically have just five per cent of their full collections on display at any one time. Many famous works are shut away in storage. A study by Quartz found that nearly a third of Claude Monet's paintings, more than 40 per cent of Pablo Picasso's works and 57 per cent of Wassily Kandinsky's art cannot be seen by the public. The main problem is a lack of space.
Arkive is a decentralized art museum that has no building. Its members decide what artworks to buy and where to display them. Acquisitions are then recorded on a blockchain. Arkive founder, Tom McLeod, told The Hustle: "We would place [an artwork] where it originated or where the artist created it or where it can be viewed by the most people." On top of solving the space problem, Arkive might also be a model for repatriating "stolen" art from museums across the rich world.