NFT and Digital Art: New Markets of a New Era

What is an NFT and Why Does it Matter for Art

NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is a record on the blockchain that certifies the “uniqueness” and ownership of a digital object. In March 2021, the artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) sold the NFT-collage “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” for $69.3 million at Christie's. This turned the art world upside down.

Why is this revolutionary? Digital images can be copied endlessly for free. An NFT creates an artificial “original”—a record in the blockchain that cannot be duplicated. This solves the problem of “digital uniqueness,” making a digital art market possible.

NFT boom 2021–2022: $40+ billion in sales. Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, generative art. Then—a collapse: trading volume dropped by 95%+ by 2023. Many NFTs bought for thousands of dollars are worth only a few.

Generative Art

Algorithmic art has existed since the 1960s (Herbert Frank). Today, artist-programmers create works generated by algorithms. Artblocks (a platform for generative NFT art): the buyer receives a unique instance from the multitude of algorithmic variants.

This raises philosophical questions. Who is the author: the programmer or the algorithm? Are all works in the series “equally original”? What is the value of “uniqueness” with scalable generation?

Refik Anadol—a Turkish artist creating monumental installations from AI trained on millions of data points (nature photographs, museum archives). “Unsupervised” at MoMA (2023): an AI “dreaming” about the MoMA collection. This is not an “AI painting” in a simplistic sense—it is a dialogue between human and AI.

Question for reflection: The NFT boom and collapse demonstrated: value is created by narrative and community, not by “objective” properties. How can this be applied to pricing of products or services in your field?