Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are non-interchangeable assets, usually digital art, which are stored on the blockchain. Preliminary studies find that female and darker-skinned NFTs are valued less than their male and lighter-skinned counterparts. However, these studies analyze only the CryptoPunks collection. We test the statistical significance of race and gender biases in the prices of CryptoPunks and present the first study of gender bias in the broader NFT market. We find evidence of racial bias but not gender bias. Our work also introduces a dataset of gender-labeled NFT collections to advance the broader study of social equity in this emerging market.
3D printingâs rapid technological development is starting to impact the art field because, for the first time, it has become possible to exactly reproduce and reconstruct artworks without any loss of their physical features. Yet, a coherent overview of how 3D printing is used within the art field while paying attention to ethical considerations does not exist. This study will provide an overview of the current developments of 3D printing in the art world, its use, and the direction it is moving toward. Within this study, the technologies that enable, influence, and will continue to affect the 3D reproduction of artworks, namely technologies necessary to capture an artworkâs materials on a chemical and physical level, artificial intelligence (AI), 3D printing technology itself, and the rise of the non-fungible token (NFT) are analyzed to be able to understand what 3D printing implies for our changing perception of art in the future.
The blistering development of the digital technologies has changed the modern art and design landscape greatly, changing the way creative works are developed, expressed, and interacted with the audience. In this paper, the author examines the introduction of new technologies into the modern art scene: artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), blockchain, and generative algorithms. These technological progressions have not only widened the horizon of creativity, but have democratized the process of producing and distributing art thereby allowing artists to tap into audiences all over the world without having to go through the traditional go-between. The research examines the impact of digital tools and platforms on artistic processes, aesthetics and conceptualization. It puts the emphasis on the transformation of passive to active and participatory experiences, in which the audiences become actively involved in creating and understanding the works of art. Also, the paper analyses how data-driven design, computational creativity and machine learning are used to create new forms of art that defy the conventional concept of authorship and originality. Moreover, this study examines socio-cultural effects of technology-based art, such as concerns with intellectual property, authenticity, as well as problems of ethics of AI-generated art. Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have brought about novel economics and artists can earn revenue on digital art at the cost of sustainability and financial instability. The research approach will include the mixed-method one that will include the qualitative analysis of case studies with the help of quantitative surveys of artists and designers. The results indicate that technology boosts both effective creativity and cross-disciplinary teamwork and allows new expressions of creativity. Digital dependence, accessibility obstacles and ethical dilemmas are among the problems that have remained. The paper then wraps up by restating the necessity of a moderated adoption of technology and human imaginative in such a way that the technological equipment becomes facilitators of the artistic expression and not substitutes. The research directions in the future are to find a sustainable way of engaging in digital art and creating a framework of the ethical use of AI in the creative field.
Digital art uses digital technology as part of the creative process or exhibition presentation. Crypto art is linked to blockchain technology and concerns certified digital artworks. Valuation profiles take their cues from the metrics traditionally used for copyright (royalty monetization or otherwise) and adapt to the peculiar case at hand. Compared to traditional art, the greater usability through web channels is typically counterbalanced by an absence of exclusivity.
Passion investment (e.g., paintings, sculptures, non-fungible tokens [NFTs]) are not based on straightforward valuations. To establish the valuation of collectible NFTs in the nascent market of digital art, this study uses approximately 14,000 transactions by 3 ,230 unique traders in a highly liquid digital collectibles market (CryptoPunks) to identify the price influences of affective factors at productâ, market participantâ, and market conditionsâlevels. In a robust, hedonic pricing model, the study offers multiple novel findings. First, there is evidence of subjective valuation of visual (aesthetic) elements of art among market participants, who are homogenous on the value of objectively measurable traits. Second, contrary to popular perception, NFT market participantsâ who are naive (in terms of crypto currency experience) or experienced a windfall gain (due to favorable cryptocurrency exchange rates) trade at lower prices. Notably, the study finds that NFT collectibles market is a sellersâ market; likely due to its decentralized character, such that sellers have direct control and influence over transactions, unlike in traditional art markets mediated by agents. Third, prior trading activity and prices positively associate with future prices, implying price extrapolation and anchoring. The findings suggest that compared to the traditional art and investment domains, digital ownership might evoke similar, if not stronger, emotional responses among consumers than physical ownership.
GĂŒncel bir konu olan Non-Fungible Token NFT (Nitelikli Fikri Tapu) kavramı çevresinde birçok tartıĆma, ĂŒretim ve kazanç oluĆmaktadır. Bu oluĆumun birçok ĂŒrĂŒnĂŒ ve alanı olsada asıl konu ĆĂŒphesiz dijital sanat çalıĆmaları ve bu çalıĆmalar çevresinde geliĆmektedir. Sanatın tanımındaki kural ve ön gerekliliklerin bu çalıĆmalarda bulunup bulunmadıÄı, sanatın dijital medyada ne kadar nitelikli uygulandıÄı gibi sorulardan ziyade bu organizasyonun ve yapının sanatçılar için neler getireceÄi, maddi kazanç, yazılım ve sanatın hibrit yapısı, bu medyanın nereye gideceÄi gibi konular kullanıcı ve izleyiciler tarafından daha çok merak edilmektedir. Bu çalıĆmada NTF nedir, sanat ve dijital sanat nedir ve NFTânin sanat ile olan iliĆkisinin nereye ulaĆabileceÄi irdelenmeye çalıĆılmıĆtır.
Abstract Liben Building, constructed in 1822 AD, is located in Xinnan Village, Hukeng Town, Yongding District, Longyan City, Fujian Province, China. This square earthen building covers an area of about 2100 square metres. In 1931 AD, the building was sacked and burned down by bandits during a war, leaving behind only the remnants of the walls of the main building. In the metaâuniverse environment, firstly, this study adopted blockchain DAO technology to conduct a study on the digital collection, storage, processing, display and dissemination of Liben Building, revealing the problems with digital regeneration of cultural heritage. Then, the questionnaire with 20 questions was designed, and 158 valid completed copies of the questionnaire were collected. Combining influence relationship with sample clustering analysis methods, this paper explored the findings of a study of the historical sites under blockchain digital heritage preservation and protection in the metaverse.
Rongxin Chen, Gabriele M. Lepori, Chung-Ching Tai, MingâChien Sung
Research on human attention indicates that objects that stand out from their surroundings, i.e., salient objects, attract the attention of our sensory channels and receive undue weighting in the decision-making process. In the financial realm, salience theory predicts that individuals will find assets with salient upsides (downsides) appealing (unappealing). We investigate whether this theory can explain investor behaviour in the cryptocurrency market. Consistent with the theory's predictions, using a sample of 1738 cryptocurrencies, we find that cryptocurrencies that are more (less) attractive to âsalient thinkersâ earn lower (higher) future returns, which indicates that they tend to be overpriced (underpriced). On average, a one cross-sectional standard-deviation increase in the salience theory value of a cryptocurrency reduces its next-week return by 0.41%. However, the salience effect is confined to the micro-cap segment of the market, and its size is moderated by limits to arbitrage.
This paper explores the contemporary aesthetics of one of the latest forms of digital art known as non-fungible tokens, aka NFTs, and how and why they are affecting and shaping todayâs society. Using Manovichâs theory of metamedium, Lanzaâs theory of biocentrism, blockchain technology, and NFTs can be theorized as a form of medium which represents many other media while augmenting them with many new properties. The main theoretical problem with NFTs in the domain of art theory is the question of their originality. When put to use through various digital art collections and online tech platforms, the backend section of the blockchain smart contract code also becomes part of art, hence it can sometimes be difficult to define NFTsâ originality of the art itself. Due to the repetitive nature of NFTs, it can be argued that the most unique component of the NFT metamedium is not art, or blockchain smart contract, but the owner of the digital art piece. With the collection of 10,000 similar pieces of art, the originality of art is evolving through the ideology of cultural groups associated with desired collections. It is shifting from the art itself to the owner. Throughout the unification of technology, software, and art, artists have a new way to extend their creations, while actively participating in the shaping of the cultural landscape. This gives both creators and collectors of the NFT metamedium a brand-new transcending meta experience beyond the art itself that gives a unique point to the originality of the art piece. Article received: May 8, 2022; Article accepted: July 15, 2022; Published online: October 15, 2022; Original scholarly paper
Open access
Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations
Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is a relatively new concept that has been a hot topic in the development of the field. The artwork generated in the form of NFT has made it an increasingly lucrative market, while there is also a lot of interest in the application of NFT to games, the metaverse and the financial economy. Therefore, this research paper will investigate the market development trend of NFT in the context of metaverse and the future outlook, especially to make a more detailed analysis of several important fields, taking art and branding industry as examples. Based on case studies and data analysis, NFTâs high pricing is attributed to a variety of factors, where the company's marketing approach is mostly creative and cross-pollinated to appeal to a wide audience. NFT has the ability to grow in the cultural sector as a whole, but it is challenging to sustain long-term prosperity due to the lack of NFT artworks and the likelihood of excessive speculation. Overall, this paper explores the value and potential of NFT using current research and accurate statistics, particularly in the areas of branding and the arts. These results shed light on guiding further exploration of NFT's market prospect and its own value realization.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have recently surged to mainstream attention by allowing the exchange of digital assets via blockchains. NFTs have also been adopted by artists to sell digital art. One of the promises of NFTs is broadening participation to the art market, a traditionally closed and opaque system, to sustain a wider and more diverse set of artists and collectors. A key sign of this effect would be the disappearance or at least reduction in importance of seller-buyer preferential ties, whereby the success of an artist is strongly dependent on the patronage of a single collector. We investigate NFT art seller-buyer networks considering several galleries and a large set of nearly 40,000 sales for over 230 M USD in total volume. We find that NFT art is a highly concentrated market driven by few successful sellers and even fewer systematic buyers. High concentration is present in both the number of sales and, even more strongly, in their priced volume. Furthermore, we show that, while a broader-participation market was present in the early phase of NFT art adoption, preferential ties have dominated during market growth, peak and recent decline. We consistently find that the top buyer accounts on average for over 80% of buys for a given seller. Similar trends apply to buyers and their top seller. We conclude that NFT art constitutes, at the present, a highly concentrated market driven by preferential seller-buyer ties.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), digital certificates of ownership for virtual art, have until recently been traded on a highly lucrative and speculative market. Yet, an emergence of misconceptions, along with a sustained market downtime, are calling the value of NFTs into question. This project (1) describes three properties that any valuable NFT should possess (permanence, immutability and uniqueness), (2) creates a quantitative summary of permanence as an initial criteria, and (3) tests our measures on 6 months of NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, finding 45% of ERC721 tokens in our corpus do not satisfy this initial criteria. Our work could help buyers and marketplaces identify and warn users against purchasing NFTs that may be overvalued.
This paper investigates non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, and examines their place within art historical canon. Crypto-art and crypto-collectibles have flooded digital markets, offering unique art. Recently, Beepleâs EverydaysâThe First 5000 Days, the first digital artwork fitted with a non-fungible token offered by the major auction house Christieâs, sold for $69,346,250 on March 11, 2021. It is the third most expensive artwork sold by a living artist, following Jeff Koonâs sculpture Rabbit (1986) and David Hockneyâs painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972). While Jeff Koons and David Hockney are the artists, whose theoretical perspectives are well known and have a secured place in an art historical canon, Beepleâs work and works of other digital NFT artists have not been fully investigated to be positioned in relation to art history, seemingly existing in a theoretical vacuum. The absence of artistic statements that usually accompany artworks contributes to this effect. Is it possible to think of the 21st century NFT-backed digital artists as the avant-gardes, who, like their 20th -century predecessors, confronted and condemned the art historical tradition? Using the case study of Beepleâs Everydays, this paper proposes an answer to the puzzling question of how a mosaic of everyday sketches produced by âpooping something out in 45 minutes,â using Beepleâs own words, was claimed to be âthe next chapter in art history.â Using historical and textual analyses, this essay provides a critical response to the recent digital artworld trends driven by the decentralized networks and currencies existing in fully digital ecosystems.
User Interaction for NFTs (Non-fungible Tokens) is gaining increasing attention. Although NFTs have been traditionally single-use and monolithic, recent applications aim to connect multimodal interaction with human behavior. This paper reviews the related technological approaches and business practices in NFT art. We highlight that multimodal interaction is a currently under-studied issue in mainstream NFT art, and conjecture that multimodal interaction is a crucial enabler for decentralization in the NFT community. We present a continuum theory and propose a framework combining a bottom-up approach with AI multimodal process. Through this framework, we put forward integrating human behavior data into generative NFT units, as "multimodal interactive NFT." Our work displays the possibilities of NFTs in the art world, beyond the traditional 2D and 3D static content.
Depending on your perspective, Non-Fungible Token (NFT) artworks are inaugurating an exciting new chapter in the history of art, or a dangerous new chapter in the history of online market bubbles. NFTs index artworks, and are typically strings of characters stored on a blockchain such as Ethereum. NFTs are not exclusively used to index artworks, and have been used to index a range of collectibles, but it is the sale of NFTs associated with artworks that has launched the phenomenon into public consciousness. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the digital artist Beepleâs sale of an NFT for the equivalent of $69 million (Krastrenakes). For some, such staggering prices suggest NFTs are poised to become the next Beanie Babiesâi.e., commodities without utility that sell at vastly inflated prices. Despite such cynicism, some argue that NFTs have revolutionary technical import, such that they could overturn many common and unequal practices within the contemporary art market (Rennie et al.). Chief among these is the supposed disposability of digital artworks, which are viewed as difficult to sell, resell, and protect from piracy. Such issues are thought to be ameliorated by NFTs, since they function as a token that is understood to stand as a âdefinitive indicator of ownershipâ of digital artworks (Mackenzie and BÄrziĆa 2). Or, as Rachel OâDwyer has summarised, NFT art auctions like the Ethereal Summit held in New York in 2018 allow individuals to bid for the âownership and provenance details of the works of art encrypted in the Ethereum blockchain and represented by a tokenâ (OâDwyer). Unlike a more conventional artwork, such as a painting, NFT artworks typically take the form of JPEGs or GIFs, and therefore circulate the Internet widely, regardless of who owns the token that designates ownership. While reproductions and printed documentations of traditional artworks are commonplaceâe.g., art gallery giftshops will often sell relatively low-cost posters of masterpieces like Picassoâs Guernica, or coffee table books showcasing the masterworks of influential movements like post-impressionismâthere are obvious material differences between the reproduction and the original. In the case of the typically digital NFT artworks, this distinction does not apply. Accordingly, the academic and popular discussions that surround NFT artworks have reignited theoretical questions around the ontological status of artworks, and the source of their economic value. For some, the NFT market is a financial bubble and the prices attracted by particular NFT-linked artworks have no underlying value (BBC News). For others, the value of NFTs can be explained through an appeal to the value subjectively attributed to the image or animation by the purchaser (Nguyen), while for others the value of NFTs should be understood in terms of digital scarcity and provenance (Rennie et al.; Joselit) or as a technological means for artists to maintain a greater share of their artworkâs value (Kugler). While the NFT market is novel, and is worthy of study in terms of its specific technological and economic forms, this article will argue that NFTs can be placed in a longer history of the emergence of what Luc Boltanski and Arnauld Esquerre have called the âenrichment economyâ. In their Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities, Boltanski and Esquerre argue that, since at least the last quarter of the twentieth century, a new site of valorisation has emerged in post-industrial economies. According to Boltanski and Esquerre, globalisation and deindustrialisation provoked many economies to embrace tourism, luxury good production, and the commodification of heritage and culture as new sites of extraction. As the viability of the mass production of commodities has receded, the production of unique commodities and transient yet âunforgettableâ experiences have become more economically significant. For Boltanski and Esquerre, enrichment refers both to the often-discursive refining and redefining of existing commoditiesâsuch that they fetch greater pricesâand a greater emphasis on an economy for those with disposable incomeâsuch as tourists, art collectors, and the wealthy more generally (3-4). Often, Boltanski and Esquerre argue, the enrichment economies of art and luxury tend to mine and exploit the âunderlying substratum that is purely and simply the pastâ (2). For this reason, the enrichment economy requires the production of new forms of authenticity, âauraâ, and belief, such that the overlooked or taken-for-granted objects of the past can be reframed as unique and worthy of investment or consumption. The interesting question, then, is not necessarily that of why someone would pay a large sum of money to own a piece of code on a blockchain, but, instead, that of how a particular piece of contemporary art or an NFT comes to be âenrichedâ with authenticity and aura. While a thoroughgoing discussion of this topic would require a longer piece, this article will nevertheless attempt to open up connections between art history, debates around the production of artistic value during and after Modernism, and the newly emerging NFT art market. While many have declared that NFTs are âdisrupting the art marketâ (Tripathi)âsupposedly evinced by the staggering growth of the NFT market, and emerging institutional recognition, such as ArtReviewâs decision to place an NFT at the top of their Power 100 List for 2021âthis article seeks to locate the NFT explosion within a slightly longer timeframe, one in which NFTs would feature as a continuationâalbeit a non-linear oneârather than a disruption of ongoing cultural and economic logics. Value and Void Despite the incredulity that commonly meets NFT artworks, the contemporary art market similarly flaunts conventional understandings of aesthetic and economic value. While many would surely agree with journalist Amy Castorâs claim that âitâs hard to justify that a Bored Ape NFT is worth $300,000 based on the artâ (quoted in Artnet), almost identical criticisms have been raised around the contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelanâs 2019 work Comedian. Released in an edition of three, Comedian consisted of a banana duct-taped to a wall, with two of the three selling for $120,000 each. As Sara Callahan puts it, works like Comedian reignited debates around âwhat makes something a high-priced artwork when another, seemingly identical, object is not?â (Callahan). While NFTs are reawakening interest in the question of artistic value, the financialisation of cheaply made and mass-produced artworks has a much longer history. Indeed, by the 1960s, a booming secondary art market that traded in increasingly expensive, yet cheap-to-produce avant-garde worksâoften requiring relatively small amounts of time and inexpensive materialsâraised suspicions that art was becoming indistinguishable from more traditional financial assets. In response, in 1968 the influential art critic Leo Steinberg argued that, âavant-garde art, lately Americanized, is for the first time associated with big money. ⊠Another decade, and we shall have mutual funds based on securities in the form of pictures held in bank vaultsâ (quoted in Beech 300). As Dave Beech has shown, in the ensuing period, âartâs relationship to finance capital has outstripped Steinbergâs worst fearsâ (Beech 301). By the 1980s, banks allowed individuals to borrow large sums of money against the value of their art collections, and investment in artworks became a normal practice of portfolio diversification (Beech 299â300). When interest rates are low, investments in productive capital offer low levels of liquidity, and international markets appear vulnerable to shocks, artworksâwhether physical or in the form of an NFTâoffer a means of hedging against future losses. Furthermore, in both the contemporary art market and the NFT market, purchases of artworks at inflated prices often allow an individual to prevent âthe bottom from falling out of a market they have already invested inâ (OâDwyer). The fact that artworks could hold a value well in excess of the cost of the materials or labour time required to produce them, was not solely recognised by art collectors and investors. Instead, this period saw a great number of artists explicitly playing with the aporia that had emerged around artâs economic valueâinsofar as ready-made artworks could now fetch prices typically reserved for laboriously produced and unique masterpieces. Take, for example, Yves Kleinâs project Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, which he developed over the late 1950s and early 1960s. In these works, Klein offered collectors the opportunity to purchase a void or âimmaterial zoneâ for varying quantities of gold, with â20 grams (3/4 ounce) of pure gold for the Zones of series no. 1, the least expensive, to 1,280 grams (27/8 pounds) for those of series no. 7, the most expensiveâ (Cras 24). In exchange for the gold, the void-owner would receive a receipt as proof of purchase. However, for the work to be completed, Klein requested that the receipt be burned by the collector, and in response Klein would throw half of the received gold into the river Seine (Cras 24). By destroying the proof of purchase, and by releasing some of the gold into the river, the collector would receive âthe full authentic immaterial value of the workâ (Klein quoted in Cras 24). We see some resemblances here between Kleinâs Zones and NFTsâand here Klein is no exception, since, as Cras has documented, the 1960s were replete with artists experimenting with the production of artworks as novel financial assets. For Cras, it was a time in which âthe problem of attaching a price to works of art and offering them for sale, traditionally considered to be external to creation in this domain, was now incorporated in artistic practiceâ (Cras 3). If artists were increasingly embracing the artworkâs status as an asset, and if the price of artworks became divorced
Introduction The proliferation of non-fungible tokens has transformed cryptocurrency artefacts into a legitimised art form now considered in mainstream art collecting as an emerging high-yield commodity based on scarcity. As photography was debated âof being artâ in the late 19th century, video art in the 1960s, virtual reality in the 1990s, and augmented reality in the 2010s, NFT art is the next medium of artwork tied to emergent cultural forms. From the concept of âintroducing scarcity from born-digital assets for the first time ever, NFTs or crypto or digital collectibles, as they are also referred to, have already shown glimpses of their potential'â (Valeonti et al. 1). Yet for NFT art, ânumerous misconceptions still exist that are partly caused by the complexity of the technology and partly by the existence of many blockchain variantsâ (Treiblmaier 2). As the discussion of NFT art is still centred on questions of justifying the legitimacy of the medium and its financial trading, critical analysis outside of these key points is still limited to blogs and online articles as the mainstay of debate. To distance NFTs from a common assumption that they are in some form or another a populous digital fad, cryptocurrencies are intended primarily as currencies, even if they maintain some asset-like properties (Baur et al.). In a broader sense, NFTs have positioned digital art as a collectable staple as âthe most common types are collectibles and artworks, objects in virtual worlds, and digitalised characters from sports and other gamesâ (Dowling). As a point of origin "NFTs were originally developed using the Ethereum blockchain, [while] many other blockchain networks now facilitate trade and exchange of NFTsâ (Wilson et al.). âGiven NFTs link to underlying assets that are unique in some way and cannot be exchanged like for likeâ (Bowden and Jones), this article will consider how artists respond to this uniqueness, which separates the art as simply trading an artefact on a crypto platform, to instead consider a different approach that attests to legitimising the medium as a conceptual space. The concept of NFTs was first introduced in 2012 with Bitcoinâs âColored Coinsâ, which referred to tokens that represent any type of physical asset âsuch as real estate properties, cars and bondsâ (Rosenfeld). To that end, the origins of NFTs, as we know, attach themselves to rarities, much the same as any other luxury trading artefact. But where NFTs differ is, as a system, in the non-fungibility of their agency and, as an artefact, the singularity of their rarity and uniqueness. As an example in art, consider a Van Gogh painting where its rarity sustains its value, as there are only a certain number of Van Gogh paintings in circulation. Thus, the value of a Van Gogh painting in the domain of rarity is determined by its metadata with attention to the verification of the authenticity of the artefact and, among others, its subsequent details of the year it was painted. NFTs work along with the same premise: both the Van Gogh paintingâs data and an NFT are non-fungible because they cannot be forged, but the painting is fungible because it can be forged. From here, there are two components to associate with NFT art. The first is the NFT, which is the data of a digital token registered on a blockchain. The second is the artefact associated with the NFT, which we know as NFT art. But the system by which NFTs exists as a blockchain is different from, say, buying shares listed in a stock market. Therefore, to find a conceptuality in NFT art, the idea of an NFT artwork as a singular tradable commodity needs to be rethought as not the artefact per se, but the effect of the condition brought about by a combination of the artefact, the currency, and nature of its transaction system. To think of these key points as an independent singularity dismantles any sense of a conceptual framework by which NFT art can exist beyond its form. As McLoughlin argues, âunlike the commercial gallery business model, NFTs are designed to cut out the need for art dealers, enabling artists to trade directly online, typically via specialist auction sitesâ (McLoughlin). With regards to the GLAM sector, the conceptuality of this disruption positions both the born-digital artefact and the system of trading of the artefact as inextricably linked together. Yet the way this link is considered, even by galleries and curators alike, invites further attention to see NFT art not as a fad, but as a beginning of an entirely new system of the digital genre. Background From an aesthetics perspective, recent hostility surrounding the acceptance of NFT art within the establishment has predictably taken issue with the low-brow nature of mainstream avatar-oriented NFT art; for example, Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cryptopunks not surprisingly have been at odds with âproperâ art. More so, other artists who have used blockchain in their practice, including Kevin McCoy, Mitchel F. Chan, and Rhea Myers, contributed to early crypto art especially in the 2010s to be inclusive of the proliferation of NFT art as a fine arts medium. Yet despite these contributions, the polarising of NFT art within the art world, as Widdington asserts, has accounted for assumptions that NFT art is identified as being of populous kitsch, lowbrow images, where contemporary art is in opposition to the critique it subjectifies itself against. The art establishmentâs disdain towards the aesthetics of NFTs is historically predictable. Early NFT art focussed on pop culture references that have significance within the crypto community (Pepe memes, collectible CryptoKitties), and similarly, in the 1980s, Jeff Koons forced the world of âhigh artâ to confront and accept his works rejoicing in pop culture (Michael Jackson, Pink Panther; Widdington). A key point from Widdingtonâs claim can be attested for other art that came before Postmodernism, linked firmly to artists using identifiers as part of their studio practice. Moreover, the tying of artwork to a non-fungible identifier is not new. Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #793B Certificate (LeWitt) compounded his manifesto that âthe idea becomes a machine that makes the artâ (LeWitt). By adopting the practice that each of his artworks was accompanied by an authenticity certificate, where the identification code forced a fungible asset to be associated with a unique non-fungible asset, it is the ownership of a certificate of authenticity, or a smart contract on the blockchain in the case of an NFT, that makes the artistâs work unique and therein valuable (Widdington). The scarcity of born-digital assets drives demand for collecting NFT art and joins a financial aspect tied to the process of buying and selling crypto assets. This is obviously different from a crypto conceptuality which exists outside the process and thereby manifests in the idea of what intersects the process, and, in the case of NFT artworks, the subject of the image being traded. Just as LeWittâs certificate of ownership was thought to raise questions about authenticity and uniqueness through abstract thinking, the concept of art derived from NFT art is fundamentally no different. Both use non-fungibility as a condition of their agency to first address what can be copied and what remains as unique. Second, the mechanism of a ledger that, for NFTs, is blockchain and, for a certificate of authenticity, is the assigned number of the unique identifier, regulates scarcity by using a system to define uniqueness. Adopting this manifesto invites a different way to consider NFT art when the main conversation about NFT art in popular journalism or blogging is a narrow discussion either about the legitimacy of NFTs as an authentic financial stock or about the amount of money they transact in collecting the artefacts. One such conceptuality is in the recent NFT artwork of Damien Hirst. NFT Art Damien Hirstâs The Currency âis composed of 10,000 NFTs linked to 10,000 individual spot paintings on paperâ (Hawkins) which are inclusive of added security devices within the paper itself to make the physical asset unique. The purchaser can decide if they would like to own the NFT âor ... keep the physical work and relinquish rights to the blockchain-based artworkâ (Goldstein). Perspectives of the project, despite the fact that âHirst has become a renewed critical target in the left and left-liberal mediaâ (White 197) for his NFT project, not to mention being lamented as âThatcherâs Warholâ (Lemmey), range from indicating âgreater fool theoryâ (Hawkins) to the questioning of a âresponsibility to other NFT artists in the marketâ (Meyohas). However, discussion on the conceptuality created by The Currency, especially its ontology, is muted if not ignored altogether, which this article considers a fundamental oversight in any credible critical assessment of NFT art. Given that Hirstâs artwork has consistently been moulded around conceptual art, whereby the idea of art becomes the artwork not necessarily found in the hand-made aspect of the artefact itself, the idea of The Currency is to question the role and relationship of art and money through an allegory. One might argue that its conceptuality then affords the idea of the artwork being a currency in itself. It speaks to divisibility, just as the cryptocurrency used to purchase the artworks is divisible of its own tender. The disjuncture in this accord is that âNFTs are not currencies themselves, but rather more like records of ownershipâ (Cornelius 2). The dot paintings on paper are created as unique artefacts where their uniqueness makes them rare, and this uniqueness makes the rarity an increase in financial value. However, subverting this are Hirstâs physical creations, where the legal tenderâs conceptuality is manufactured with watermarks, security embeds, and financial markings the same as traded bills. If this perspective is considered a concept, not a digital selli
As digital art topped the list of other arts in post-industrial society, the theoretical and methodological fields of art history it is necessary to clarify a range of definitions of digital art, systematize them and bring them into compliance with international classification.
 The subject of the study is the phenomenon of NFT (non-fungible token), which in 2021 took first place in the annual ranking of the most influential people in the field of art Power 100. NFT â a phenomenon of not only virtual but also modern culture in general.
 The object of research is digital art, in the space of which there is a phenomenon that we study. The purpose of the article is to find out the place and role of NFT in the development of digital art and its significance for art in general. The author considers such aspects of the topic as: the place of virtual art in contemporary art; the importance of NFT for digital art and culture in general; prospects and risks of including the field of art into the experiments with NFT.
 The scientific novelty of the work is the consideration and analysis of those aspects of digital art that have become particularly relevant in the last five years.
 As a result of the study, the author concludes the following.
 
 Since NFT has recently been associated with art, it is natural to study this phenomenon in terms of its place in art. NFT is a new tool that meets some of the needs of creators, users, and collectors of high-end digital and non-digital objects.
 The presence in the NFT phenomenon of such attributes as authenticity of the object, competitiveness, market value, demand and supply, indicate that a new segment of the art market has begun to appear. The autonomous and independent NFT market can be interpreted as the beginning of the separation of digital art from the underlying art. And while it is hard to call it art in the traditional sense today, it is more likely to be digital property.
 The main difference between the NFT market and the usual basic art market is that the artist is valued as a person at the former, and the work itself is valued at the traditional one.
 The formation of the third field of art (after the first field â âold mastersâ, the second field â modern art, created by traditional means) requires the development of a complex of definitions for its full-fledged comprehension.
We are witnessing the emergence of a new digital art market, the art market 3.0. Blockchain technology has taken on a new sector which is still not well known, Non-Fungible tokens (NFT). In this paper we propose a new methodology to build a NFT Price Index that represents this new market on the whole. In addition, this index will allow us to have a look on the dynamics and performances of NFT markets, and to diagnose them.
NFT or Non-Fungible Token is a token that certifies a digital asset to be unique. A wide range of assets including, digital art, music, tweets, memes, are being sold as NFTs. NFT-related content has been widely shared on social media sites such as Twitter. We aim to understand the dominant factors that influence NFT asset valuation. Towards this objective, we create a first-of-its-kind dataset linking Twitter and OpenSea (the largest NFT marketplace) to capture social media profiles and linked NFT assets. Our dataset contains 245,159 tweets posted by 17,155 unique users, directly linking 62,997 NFT assets on OpenSea worth 19 Million USD. We have made the dataset public. We analyze the growth of NFTs, characterize the Twitter users promoting NFT assets, and gauge the impact of Twitter features on the virality of an NFT. Further, we investigate the effectiveness of different social media and NFT platform features by experimenting with multiple machine learning and deep learning models to predict an asset's value. Our results show that social media features improve the accuracy by 6% over baseline models that use only NFT platform features. Among social media features, count of user membership lists, number of likes and retweets are important features.