All museums will build a metaverse copy using NFTs, predicts contemporary art chief at world's largest museum

• The head of contemporary art at the State Hermitage Museum predicts museums will have digital copies of themselves in the metaverse.
• In an interview with Cointelegraph, Dmitry Ozerkov discussed his vision for the future of artwork on the metaverse.

Museums all over the world will eventually build digital copies of themselves in the metaverse.

That's according to Dmitry Ozerkov, the head of the contemporary art department at the State Hermitage Museum, which is the largest in the world by gallery space and houses 3 million works of art.

He has a vision for the historic museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, to fully integrate with the metaverse.

"We are all moving into the digital era and our digital twin will be following us everywhere," Ozerkov said in an interview with Cointelegraph.

He also curated "The Ethereal Aether," the State Hermitage Museum's first virtual exhibition, which went on display last month. The platform featured digital artwork in the form of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.

The exhibition differs from the physical museum because onlookers were able to interact with the NFTs on display.

And as he develops the museum's digital twin — dubbed the Celestial Hermitage — Ozerkov he sees NFTs as a new opportunity for the art world.

"You can pass through these doors without touching anything, while in the virtual world, you can do anything: you can play with artworks, you can make them interactive, you can add data to it," he said.