The Rich, the Poor, and the Ugly: An Aesthetic-Perspective Assessment of NFT Values

Abstract

The adoption of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has revolutionized digital art transactions, providing artists with unprecedented opportunities to tokenize and monetize their generative creations, leading to increased scrutiny and demand within blockchain-oriented marketplaces. The pricing of NFT artworks, however, exhibits substantial variations within and across collections, influenced by various factors. This study aims to investigate the relationship between visual features and pricing, shedding light on the variations underlying the pricing of NFTs. First, measures of both computational aesthetics and visual complexity were applied to extract multi-faceted visual aesthetic features, encompassing aesthetic factors such as color and composition as well as complexity factors like entropy. Second, with extracted visual aesthetic features and preprocessed price data, the study proceeds to conduct correlation analysis within collections and statistical modeling across collections. Through these approaches, we reveal a moderate correlation between visual features and prices within collections, while also identifying different influential visual features across collections. The differential performance of price models highlights the distinctiveness and unique pricing characteristics of NFT collections.