Art of Her

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 имеет обширную коллекцию цифрового искусства, в которой представлены такие художники, как Тони Оурслер, Петра Кортрайт и Райан Трекартин. По словам Дхандры Лоусон, помощника куратора отдела фотографии LACMA, новый фонд представляет собой признание музеем нынешнего уровня инноваций в области искусства и технологий.

«Это чрезвычайно плодотворный период для цифрового искусства. Мы просто видим тонны инноваций художников в различных средствах массовой информации. Фонд действительно поможет нам существенно увеличить и расширить нашу коллекцию», — рассказала Дхандра Лоусон.

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.