The day art learned to breathe on the blockchain
On March 11, 2021, in a Christie’s auction room in New York, an unusual silence settled in. No murmurs from experts, no hammer clicks, not even the echo of visitors’ footsteps. Instead, numbers scrolled across a giant screen, like a race against time. Everydays: The First 5000 Days, a digital mosaic of 5,000 images created day after day by an artist unknown to the general public, had just sold for $69.3 million. The buyer? An anonymous collector known by the pseudonym MetaKovan, who paid in cryptocurrency without ever having seen the work in person. That evening, Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, became the third most expensive living artist in history, behind Jeff Koons and David Hockney. But more than the money, it was the act itself that marked a turning point: for the first time, a digital certificate—a non-fungible token (NFT)—was worth more than a masterpiece. Art had just entered a new era, where scarcity was no longer a question of material, but of code.
By Artedusa
••12 min readYet behind the glare of records and media hype, a question lingers: what if this revolution was nothing but a mirage? What if NFTs, far from liberating artists, merely replicated the flaws of the traditional market—only worse—more speculative, more ephemeral, more unequal? To understand this, we must go back to the origins of the movement, where it all began: in the margins of the internet, between technological utopianism and delusions of grandeur.
01When the pixel became sacred
Once upon a time, in 2017, two software developers, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, were bored stiff. To amuse themselves, they created CryptoPunks, a series of 10,000 pixelated faces generated by algorithm, inspired by London punks and 1980s cyberculture. They distributed them for free to anyone with an Ethereum wallet. No one, not even they, expected these little 24x24-pixel figures to become, four years later, icons worth millions. Yet in February 2021, CryptoPunk #7804—an alien smoking a pipe—sold for $7.57 million at Christie’s. How to explain such enthusiasm for what is, after all, just a low-resolution image?
The answer lies in one word: scarcity. Before NFTs, the digital realm was a kingdom of infinity, where everything could be copied, shared, and modified endlessly. A JPEG of the Mona Lisa was worth as much as any other—nothing. NFTs introduced a radical break: for the first time, a digital work could be unique, or at least limited, thanks to blockchain. This technology, which underpins cryptocurrencies, acts as an immutable ledger where every transaction is recorded. When you buy an NFT, you don’t acquire the image itself, but proof of ownership, a certificate of authenticity etched in digital stone. It was this idea, as simple as it was revolutionary, that seduced collectors: owning the original of a digital work, just as one would own a Monet.
But this sacralization of the pixel did not emerge from nothing. It is part of a long history of digital art, dating back to the 1960s, when pioneers like Frieder Nake or Vera Molnár experimented with the first computer-generated creations. At the time, these works were seen as curiosities, toys for engineers. It took until the 2000s and the rise of net.art for artists like Olia Lialina or JODI to explore the aesthetic potential of the web. Yet despite their radicality, these works remained trapped in a paradox: how to sell something that, by nature, is infinitely reproducible? NFTs provided an answer, but at the cost of a new question: is this artificial scarcity really art, or just a marketing trick?
02The artist, the coder, and the speculator: a ménage à trois
If NFTs have upended the art market, it is also because they have redefined the role of the artist. Take the case of Fewocious, real name Victor Langlois. At 18, this digital art prodigy sold his first works on the Nifty Gateway platform. Within months, he became a star, with pieces like Nice to Meet You, I’m Mr. MiSUNDERSTOOD selling for $2.16 million. His style? A mix of manga, cyberpunk, and teenage emotions, all bathed in acid colors. But what stands out about Fewocious is not just his talent—it’s his mastery of NFT codes. He instinctively understands that in this new world, the artist must be creator, community manager, and entrepreneur all at once. His drops—these flash sales where works sell out in minutes—are veritable events, orchestrated like high-tech product launches.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is Pak, the mysterious artist whose face no one knows. Pak doesn’t sell images, but concepts. His most famous work, The Merge, earned $91.8 million in December 2021. The principle? The more collectors buy "mass" (an abstract unit represented by a sphere), the larger the sphere grows. The work is both a performance, a social experiment, and a critique of speculation. Pak pushes digital art to its limits, turning it into a pure idea, stripped of all materiality. Between Fewocious and Pak, a new generation of artists is emerging, for whom code is as important as the paintbrush.
Yet behind these success stories lies a less glamorous reality. Most artists who venture into NFTs sell nothing, or almost nothing. A 2022 study revealed that 95% of NFTs traded on OpenSea sell for less than $200. Worse still, the market is riddled with wash trades—fake transactions where the same actor buys and sells a work to artificially inflate its price. In 2021, a Wall Street Journal investigation found that 80% of NFTs sold on certain platforms were fakes. In this digital Wild West, artists must navigate between the promise of unprecedented freedom and the risk of being scammed.
03The blockchain, or the illusion of eternity
Imagine a masterpiece hanging in a museum. It has survived centuries, wars, fires, regime changes. Now imagine a digital work, stored on a server somewhere in the world. What happens if the server crashes? If the file format becomes obsolete? If the blockchain it’s recorded on disappears? This is the paradox of NFTs: they promise eternal ownership, but rely on ephemeral technologies.
Take Quantum, considered the very first NFT, created in 2014 by Kevin McCoy. At the time, McCoy used Namecoin, a blockchain now almost forgotten. In 2021, the work was rediscovered and sold for $1.4 million. But what if Namecoin had disappeared in the meantime? Would the work have become inaccessible, like a book burned in a library? This is the problem of "dead links," those broken connections that render some works invisible. A Cambridge University study estimates that 20% of NFTs point to missing files.
To circumvent this issue, solutions are emerging. Platforms like Arweave or IPFS offer decentralized storage, where files are duplicated across thousands of computers worldwide. But these technologies have their limits: they are expensive, complex to implement, and there’s no guarantee they will stand the test of time. After all, who still remembers floppy disks, CD-ROMs, or even the first websites of the 1990s?
The question of NFT preservation raises a broader debate: what remains of a digital work once the technology supporting it has vanished? Some, like artist Refik Anadol, bet on interactivity. His Machine Hallucinations, exhibited at MoMA, are AI-generated landscapes that evolve in real time. For Anadol, the work is not a static file, but a living process, a conversation between artist, machine, and viewer. In this vision, the blockchain is just one tool among others, and true value lies in the experience, not possession.
04The museum faces its digital reflection
In 2023, the Centre Pompidou caused a sensation by announcing its first exhibition dedicated to NFTs. Titled NFTs at the Museum, it featured a selection of works acquired by the institution, including Pak’s The Merge and Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations. For the first time, a major French museum officially recognized NFTs as a legitimate art form. Yet this legitimization is not without ambiguity. How do you exhibit a digital work in a physical space? Should it be projected on a screen, printed, or simply display the certificate of ownership? And most importantly, how do you reconcile the immateriality of NFTs with the traditional mission of museums—to preserve collective memory?
MoMA, a pioneer in this field, opted for a hybrid approach. In 2022, it acquired Refik Anadol: Unsupervised, a generative installation that transforms the museum’s data into dreamlike landscapes. The work is both physical—projected in a museum gallery—and digital—existing as an NFT. This duality reflects a broader trend: NFTs do not replace traditional art, but complement it. They allow museums to explore new forms of storytelling, like dynamic NFTs—works that evolve based on external data (weather, stock market, etc.).
Yet this integration is not without resistance. In 2022, art critic Jerry Saltz published a scathing op-ed in New York Magazine, comparing NFTs to a "pyramid scheme." In his view, museums that collect them are complicit in a speculative bubble where art is reduced to just another financial asset. Institutions respond cautiously: they do not deny the market’s excesses, but highlight the potential of NFTs to attract new audiences, particularly younger generations. After all, if a teenager spends hours collecting skins in Fortnite, why wouldn’t they be interested in digital art?
05When art becomes a power game
Behind the records and technical innovations, NFTs conceal a darker reality: that of a market where power is concentrated in the hands of a few. Take Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), those pixelated apes that sell for millions. In 2022, Yuga Labs raised $450 million and acquired the rights to CryptoPunks, becoming the Disney of NFTs. But this concentration is problematic. Contrary to the decentralized ideal of cryptocurrencies, the NFT market is increasingly controlled by companies that dictate the rules of the game.
Another controversial issue: royalties. One of the promises of NFTs was to allow artists to earn revenue from every resale of their work, thanks to smart contracts. In theory, this is revolutionary: for the first time, an artist could live off their work even after selling it. In practice, it’s more complicated. Some platforms, like OpenSea, removed royalties in 2023 under pressure from collectors. The result? Artists like XCOPY, whose works resell for millions, no longer earn a cent from secondary transactions.
This tension between idealism and capitalism lies at the heart of the NFT debate. For their defenders, they represent an unprecedented democratization of art, where anyone can become a collector or creator. For their detractors, they merely replicate the inequalities of the traditional market—only worse: more volatile, more opaque, more speculative. As artist Hito Steyerl puts it, "NFTs are the wet dream of neoliberalism—they turn art into a pure financial product."
06Art after the end of the world
In 2021, as the NFT market reached its peak, one work particularly stood out: Beeple’s Crossroads. It was an animation showing a giant, naked Donald Trump covered in graffiti, lying in a park while passersby ignored or trampled him. The work sold for $6.6 million, but with a twist: its content changed based on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. If Trump won, the work showed a triumphant Trump; if he lost, the current version displayed. Crossroads was a perfect example of what NFTs could bring to art: an interactive, almost living dimension, where the work evolves with the world around it.
This idea of a reactive art, directly connected to its time, is central to the practice of many NFT artists. Take Pak’s The Merge: the work isn’t fixed; it grows as collectors buy "mass." Or Async Art, a platform where works change based on external data, like Bitcoin’s price or the weather. These creations reflect a worldview where everything is connected, where art is no longer an object to contemplate, but a process to experience.
Yet this interactive dimension raises a fundamental question: if a work can change at any moment, what remains of it once the technology supporting it disappears? Are NFTs doomed to be ephemeral artifacts, like silent films or early video games? Or can they, on the contrary, pave the way for new, more democratic and resilient forms of art?
One thing is certain: NFTs have already changed our relationship with art. They have shown that the value of a work lies not only in its materiality, but in its history, its community, its context. They have also revealed the limits of our obsession with ownership: in the digital age, possessing a work no longer means much. What matters is what we do with it.
07Epilogue: the day the Mona Lisa blinked
In 2024, as the NFT market stabilized after the excesses of previous years, a new trend emerged: AI NFTs, works generated by artificial intelligence. Artists like Refik Anadol or Robbie Barrat use algorithms to create dreamlike landscapes, impossible portraits, worlds that exist only in code. These works pose a dizzying question: if a machine can create art, what is the artist for?
For some, it’s a threat. For others, a liberation. After all, hasn’t the history of art always been one of collaboration between humans and technology? From perspective to photography, every innovation was first seen as heresy before becoming the norm. NFTs are no exception. They may be the symptom of an era where art belongs to no one, and thus to everyone.
One day, perhaps, a digital work will become as famous as the Mona Lisa. It won’t hang in a museum, but circulate through the labyrinths of the internet, changing shape with each transaction, growing over time, like a living organism. And the day someone tries to copy it, to right-click it, they’ll realize one thing: it’s not the image that matters, but the story it tells. The story of a world where art finally learned to breathe, even in the digital void.