Ethics of Contemporary Collecting

I worked with my colleague Gabi Arrigoni to write a chapter on ‘Minting New Collecting Challenges: A Reflective Analysis of the Ethical Dilemmas Around Collecting NFTs’, for the Routledge publication ‘Ethics of Contemporary Collecting’. At the time, Gabi and I were working in the V&A’s Design & Digital curatorial team. The team had a healthy scepticism to NFTs – given the intense environmental cost, vulnerability to financial speculation, and the practical challenges of collection – but were frequently asked about our engagement with NFTs, given our specialism. The work this chapter did was to make public the decision-making processes of the team (ultimately not to collect), and to bring critical analysis to frame that thinking.