What Is the Future of NFTs and Digital Art?

This is part of the appeal: highly valuable art that can be bought in shares and made accessible to the broader collecting public. Buyers are often able to access better deals on NFTs than art sold at auction or in galleries, because artists can cut out the middleman and sell directly online. Unlike a traditional painting or sculpture, the blockchain code within each NFT holds an unchangeable record of its transaction history, so its provenance is much easier to trace than other artworks.

These benefits may be why NFT sales have not completely disappeared after the post-COVID bubble. In fact, some galleries are betting on the resurgence of digital art generally. Adam Heft Beringer’s Heft Gallery on the Lower East Side in New York City launched this past spring to accommodate artists whose work includes generative code, scanners, machine learning, and other “systems.” The online marketplace SuperRare introduced a brick-and-mortar gallery, Offline, whose first public exhibition opened in July. It included 15 artists whose work at least partially leverages digital tools.

In both of these cases, physical gallery space acts as a community-building mechanism, in addition to a profit-building one. Heft Gallery and Offline position themselves as creator-first ventures interested in expanding the definition of digital art to encompass much more than just NFTs. The rise of commercially available, large language models has created many more opportunities for artists to ideate and execute their visual work. As acceptance for AI-generated content in the corporate world expands, it is only natural that the same would eventually happen in the art world. Only time will tell if the market follows.