Paris Hilton has launched a fund to acquire digital art by women

Paris Hilton Hollywood actress and singer has co-founded a new fund to support women's digital art, reports The Art NewsPaper.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) has launched a new acquisition fund for digital art by women artists, established by the celebrity Paris Hilton. The museum declined to share how much it had received from Hilton but said that the gift is the institution’s first of its kind for digital art. 

Lacma has a robust collection of digital art, with artists such as Tony Oursler, Petra Cortright and Ryan Trecartin represented in its holdings. The new fund represents the museum’s acknowledgment of the current levels of innovation around art and technology, according to Dhyandra Lawson, assistant curator in Lacma’s photography department.

“This is an extremely fertile period for digital art. We’re just seeing tons of innovation by artists in a variety of media. The fund will really help us augment and expand our collection in important ways.” Dhyandra Lawson says.

The museum has already commissioned and acquired one video work with the new fund. The Question (2022), by British artist Shantell Martin, “uses digital technologies to engage drawing”, according to a press release. Lacma also announced its acquisition of Continuum: Los Angeles (2022), a 40-minute video received as a gift by its artist, Krista Kim, who is Canadian Korean. Both works were delivered as NFTs (non-fungible tokens). They will be included in an exhibition examining digital innovation by women artists scheduled to open this fall at Arizona State University.

The acquisition fund is in many ways an unsurprising move for Hilton, who has become one of the most high-profile proponents of NFTs. The celebrity has invested in cryptocurrency since 2016 and has proclaimed herself “Queen of the Metaverse”.

The fund’s focus on women artists reflects a steady trend in the museum world to address gender inequality in institutional collections. The Baltimore Museum of Art, for one, pledged to acquire only work by women artists in 2020, earmarking $2.5m for purchases. But considering the price of artworks and the historical bias of buying art by men, achieving gender parity will be a challenge for many institutions. A 2019 study by Artnet News and In Other Words found that among 26 museums in the US, just 11% of acquisitions between 2008 and 2018 were of works by women artists.