This study examines the transformation of artistic ownership in fine arts through blockchain-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It explores how NFTs reshape traditional systems of provenance, authenticity, and value creation by decentralising ownership verification and embedding transaction records within blockchain infrastructure. Using a qualitative research design based on secondary data analysis, the study synthesises findings from academic literature, industry reports, and case studies of NFT marketplaces and institutional adoption. The analysis is grounded in Actor-Network Theory, Institutional Theory, and Cultural Economics, enabling a multidimensional interpretation of technological, institutional, and economic change. Findings indicate that NFTs reconfigure artistic ownership through programmable smart contracts, disrupt traditional intermediary roles in the art world, and introduce new forms of digital scarcity that drive speculative valuation. However, challenges such as regulatory ambiguity, environmental concerns, and market volatility remain significant. The study concludes that NFTs represent not merely a technological innovation but a structural transformation of ownership systems in contemporary fine arts. Keywords: Blockchain, NFTs, Artistic Ownership, Fine Arts, Digital Art Markets, Cultural Economics, Institutional Change
Rahman Najia, Mahbub Md. Seratul, Amin Md. Ruhul, Kazi Abdul Mannan
The rapid expansion of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has transformed the digital art ecosystem by enabling decentralised ownership, new economic models, and global market access for artists and collectors. However, the sustainability of NFT-based art remains highly contested, particularly in relation to environmental, economic, and social dimensions. This study investigates stakeholder perceptions of sustainability in NFT-based art through a qualitative analysis of secondary data, including academic literature, industry reports, and documented narratives of artists and collectors. Grounded in socio-technical systems theory and sustainability transition theory, the study explores how technological developments, market dynamics, and social discourses shape sustainability perceptions. The findings reveal a complex and often contradictory landscape: while NFTs are perceived as empowering tools that enhance artistic autonomy and financial opportunities, they are also criticised for their environmental impact, speculative nature, and ethical challenges. Technological innovations such as proof-of-stake mechanisms and green NFTs are gradually reshaping perceptions, though scepticism persists. The study concludes that sustainability in NFT-based art is a socially constructed and evolving concept requiring integrated technological, economic, and social approaches. Keywords NFT art; sustainability perception; blockchain technology; digital art economy; green NFTs; socio-technical systems; sustainability transition
How do art entrepreneurs make decisions about adopting blockchain technologies? This study examines the link between non-fungible token (NFT) adoption and business outcomes. Through survey data from 35 Czech art market stakeholders, including curators, art dealers and galleries, we investigate the strategic decision to adopt NFT technology through the lens of digital entrepreneurship and digital affordance theory. Our results highlight the potential of NFTs in addressing historical challenges of the art industry, such as provenance tracking, authenticity verification and transaction transparency while also identifying challenges and adoption barriers, such as regulatory uncertainties. We also show that while respondents rate blockchain systems as potentially useful, the actual NFT adoption rate remains low. These findings provide actionable insights for stakeholders and contribute to entrepreneurship literature by investigating entrepreneurial decision-making in markets adopting digital innovations.
How do consumers form preferences when they cannot rely on established quality standards? We examined this question in the context of non-fungible token (NFT) art markets, where buyers lack evaluative anchors such as provenance, conventional aesthetic criteria, or institutional endorsement. We demonstrated that view counts, a social cue that reflects others' attention, are one key attribute. Across a 150-day observational dataset (N = 1,459,979), a pre-registered 20-wave panel study, and six experiments, we documented that artworks that attract early views accumulate disproportionately greater attention over time, while other artworks fall further behind. We showed that this “snowballing” effect is driven by investment motives. When consumers approach markets with the motive to invest rather than collect, they rely on others' attention as a proxy for market value. Two structural features of the NFT market amplify this reliance: high price volatility and purely digital ownership, both of which heighten the salience of investment outcomes. By attenuating volatility or introducing tangible ownership cues, we diminished this reliance on social signals. Our findings extend theory on social influence and digital consumption, demonstrating that in the absence of objective quality standards, social cues shift from supplementary information to the primary basis for preference formation.
Cultural and creative industries face persistent challenges in securing sustainable financing and equitable governance, particularly under traditional models reliant on centralized intermediaries and public subsidies. This study examines the potential of decentralized autonomous organizations, enabled by blockchain technology, to address these constraints through innovative governance and financing mechanisms. Using a quantitative methodology supported by t -tests, bootstrap resampling and analysis of variance (ANOVA), the analysis draws on multiple public data sets to assess the effects of these organizations on financing access, market performance, income stability and governance inclusivity across the sector. The results show that decentralized organizations substantially expand available financing, with treasury sizes far exceeding traditional benchmarks, and increase market engagement through high-value digital asset sales, although differences in broader market potential are not statistically significant. Income stability improves in several projects, while governance outcomes vary by subsector, with inclusive decision-making often challenged in larger communities. Grounded in digital economy, organizational, stakeholder and sustainability theories, the study fills a critical empirical gap in research on decentralized models within cultural and creative contexts. It offers actionable insights for policymakers and practitioners and highlights the need for future work on subsector dynamics and regulatory frameworks that can support the democratizing potential of decentralized governance.
Το Πολυσύμπαν (αγγλικά: metaverse), ένα εμβυθιστικό και διασυνδεδεμένο ψηφιακό οικοσύστημα που συνδυάζει την επαυξημένη και την εικονική πραγματικότητα, επαναπροσδιορίζει με ταχύ ρυθμό τα όρια του δικαίου της διανοητικής ιδιοκτησίας. Στα εικονικά αυτά περιβάλλοντα, άτομα και επιχειρήσεις μπορούν να δημιουργούν, να κατέχουν, να εμπορεύονται και να αξιοποιούν οικονομικά ψηφιακά αγαθά — από εικονική τέχνη και μουσική έως άβαταρ (avatars), εικονικά ακίνητα και επώνυμες εμπειρίες. Οι νέες αυτές μορφές δημιουργικότητας, ωστόσο, αναδεικνύουν σημαντικά κενά στα υφιστάμενα νομικά πλαίσια, τα οποία έχουν σχεδιαστεί πρωτίστως για τον φυσικό κόσμο. Στο παρόν άρθρο εξετάζονται οι αναδυόμενες προκλήσεις προστασίας των δικαιωμάτων διανοητικής ιδιοκτησίας (ΔΔΙ) στο metaverse, με έμφαση στο δίκαιο της πνευματικής ιδιοκτησίας, των εμπορικών σημάτων και των διπλωμάτων ευρεσιτεχνίας. Παράλληλα, ενσωματώνονται προσεγγίσεις από την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση, τις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες και την Ινδία, με εξέταση ζητημάτων διασυνοριακής επιβολής, του ρόλου της τεχνητής νοημοσύνης και της αυξανόμενης επιρροής μοντέλων ιδιοκτησίας που βασίζονται στην τεχνολογία blockchain, όπως τα Μη Ανταλλάξιμα Διακριτικά (Non-Fungible Tokens – NFTs). Το άρθρο υποστηρίζει ότι, παρότι το ισχύον δίκαιο παρέχει μερική προστασία, η διαμόρφωση ενός εναρμονισμένου και τεχνολογικά προσαρμοστικού παγκόσμιου ρυθμιστικού πλαισίου είναι απαραίτητη για τη διασφάλιση της καινοτομίας και της δημιουργικότητας στα εικονικά περιβάλλοντα.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are assets on a blockchain that represent ownership of digital art and are traded on NFT marketplaces. The NFT market on the Ethereum blockchain was monopolistic until the end of 2022, when a new marketplace entered and captured a significant market share. This paper collects transactions from these marketplaces to study the effects of increased competition on the incumbent marketplace, artists, and investors. While competition had positive effects by reducing transaction costs, increasing trading volume and attracting new users, it decreased the profits of artists, discouraged them from creating new artwork, and thereby reduced the supply of new assets. I also study user migration, multi-homing behavior, and market segmentation, and compares the results with the predictions from theories of platform economics.
This article examines the NFT market and art tokenization in the context of money laundering. It explores the evolution of the art market toward digitalization, the definition of NFTs, and their legal and technical aspects. Additionally, it highlights the rapid growth of the market and associated risks, such as fraud, sanction evasion, and money laundering. It discusses mechanisms for concealing illicit funds, as well as the lack of clear regulations and oversight of NFT platforms within the AML/CFT framework. It emphasizes the need for regulatory clarification, the establishment of transaction registries, and addresses other unresolved issues related to NFTs, including intellectual property protection and tax obligations.
Mazin Nawwaf Assi, Sumeet Kaur, Swati Chaudhary, Pompi Das Sengupta · 7 authors
With the fast adoption of artificial intelligence in the art and cultural industry, the production, curation, distribution, and management of creative works have been radically transformed. Intelligent systems that allow artists, curators, institutions, platforms, and intelligent systems to work together in continuous interaction are now known as AI-driven art ecosystems. The paper explores management innovation as it manifests in AI-based art systems, the changes in managerial practices, forms of governance and decision making, in reaction to advanced computational creativity and data-driven work. The paper conceptualizes AI-based art systems as multi-layered systems that include creative production, curatorial intelligence and digital distribution systems such as online galleries and non-fungible token-based markets. It emphasizes the ways in which management innovation is developed in the form of a workflow redesign that combines automation and human-AI partnership to allow efficiency without sacrificing artistic intent and cultural sensitivity. Additionally, the paper focuses on the governance innovations that respond to the issues of transparency, accountability, ethical compliance, and authorship attribution in creative settings with algorithms mediating them. The resource orchestration is considered a key managerial competency with a focus on the strategic alignment of data resources, innovative talent, and computing resources. The study further examines the AI-enhanced decision-making in the context of art institutions and how the predictive analytics and the intelligent recommendation systems can be used in audience engagement prediction, curatorial planning, and portfolio management. Based on the selected case studies of AI-integrated museums, hybrid creative studios, and global AI-art hubs, the paper finds the best practices and benchmarking perspectives.
Sandip Sane, Dr. Diksha Tripathi, Anagha Bhope, Aditee Huparikar Shah · 7 authors
One of the ways in which blockchain technology is transforming the visual arts ecosystem is by providing decentralized, transparent, and verifiable systems of ownership, distribution, and value exchange of digital art. This paper analyzes how blockchain has been disruptive to visual arts in modern times, specifically in non-fungible tokens (NFTs), creative economies, and artist-collector relationships. Historically, the digital artworks were associated with the issues with provenance, copyright protection, scarcity, and justifiable monetization. Blockchain overcomes these weaknesses by providing immutable registries, smart contracts, and tokenization to allow artists to have verifiable ownership, determine authenticity, and earn automatic royalties on transactions in the secondary market. The study takes a conceptual and analytical structure by synthesising the extant literature, platform case studies and new blockchain-based art markets to assess the worth of NFTs in redefining artistic value, authorship and market forces. The results suggest that blockchain makes global art markets more democratic by decreasing the use of intermediaries including galleries and auction houses, which are central, and thus giving power to independent and new artists. Simultaneously, it cultivates new creative economies in which digital scramble, community contribution and speculative finance overlap. Nevertheless, the paper also singles out some fundamental challenges such as environmental sustainability issues, market unpredictability, regulatory ambiguity and the issues of artistic legitimacy and cultural value. The article presents the argument that although blockchain does not substitute the traditional art institutions, it supports them by providing hybrid ecosystems through integrations of physical and digital practices. All in all, the study suggests blockchain as a revolutionary infrastructure to the visual arts, reinventing ownership, trust, and economic frameworks and proposing a sustainable, ethical, and inclusive future to enable the long-term development of digital art ecosystems.
Yogesh, Saniya Khurana, Sourav Rampal, Pastor R. Arguelles · 7 authors
Data analytics implementation into the modern art market has changed the way the stakeholders analyze, invest, and interact with art pieces. The art market, traditionally opaque and subjectively valued, is currently adopting data-driven approaches to increase transparency and efficacy, as well as, decision-making. This essay examines the primary importance of the data analytics in transforming the art ecosystem with an emphasis on its uses, advantages, and difficulties. It starts with defining the key elements and classes of analytics: descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive and the technological tools used: artificial intelligence, big data platforms, machine learning algorithms. The tools are then placed in the framework of the art market and discussed on how they can solve the inefficiencies of pricing, valuation, and demand forecasting. Case study examples show how analytics can be used to identify the rising artists, identify the market trends, and prevent fraud risks and manipulation. Alongside these benefits, the paper also mentions such limitations as the lack of data, ethical concerns, and algorithmic bias. Lastly, it also looks into the future opportunities which include blockchain integration, value of digital art and analytics of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). In general, this paper highlights the fact that data analytics is not just democratizing the art investment, but also reshaping cultural and economic value in the ever more digital marketplace.
Oct 30, 2025·2025 1st IEEE Uttar Pradesh Section Women in Engineering International Conference on Electrical Electronics and Computer Engineering (UPWIECON)
The barriers toward the economy for underbanked communities are made much deeper due to their access to formal financial services. In recent years, mobile infrastructure and blockchain technology have opened new corners for the establishment of digital identity systems that show promise enabling secure and verifiable identity for greater access to finance. This study contrasts the systems through very rigorous casework in India and Uganda, and a technical comparison of mobile-based concurrent mobile and blockchain-enabled self-sovereign identity (SSI) frameworks. Observations from survey data supplement them by indicating trends on user adoption and challenges. Results indicate that digital identities give an additional entry into financial services anywhere between 20 to 30 percent for the under banked. Although they are the most affected by resistance posed by tried and tested issues such as low digital literacy, lack of infrastructural facilities, trust deficit among consumers, and so on. A hybrid digital identity framework with Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) is thus proposed, which combines the widely accepted benefits of mobile systems with the enhanced privacy and data protection features offered by the blockchain technology. The model is constructed based on affordability, interoperability, and user agency; thus, it is scalable and inclusive to the economic realities faced by sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Abstract New technologies, such as 3D digital rendering, immersive platforms, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and AI, are creating new opportunities within the fashion industry, including virtual fashion. This chapter discusses how fashion brands communicate virtual products, by analysing the Neo-Ex campaign from Carlings. The study takes its point of departure in the key questions: What arguments are employed to market the garments, and how do fashion brands create a demand for these novel products, as well as attempting to construct a consumer understanding of what this new phenomenon is. Using a multimodal method and a document study, the study analyses campaign material, films, images, and articles, through the lens of brands as cultural intermediaries. Three themes emerged: virtual fashion as a concept for identity construction that advocates creativity , attitude , futurism , and early adopters , as well as communicating that virtual fashion is sustainability conscious. The main contribution is identifying the following three tactics for communicating virtual fashion: utilising emerging technologies for identity construction; educating the consumer; and using sustainability to validating its existence . While the first two tactics focus on building consumer awareness and acceptance, the third highlights sustainability as a rationale to legitimise virtual products.
Pixels and market cycles both move NFT prices. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique digital assets, often used to represent ownership of digital art, collectibles, and other media, secured on blockchain networks like Ethereum. The rise of NFTs has led to the creation of a multi-billion-dollar market for digital art and collectibles, making it a key area of interest for researchers, artists, and investors. Using 94,039 transactions from 26 major generative Ethereum collections, this study extracts 196 machine-quantified image descriptors - color, composition, palette structure, geometry, texture, and deep-learning embeddings - and applies a three-stage filter to identify stable predictors for hedonic regression. A static mixed-effects model shows that market sentiment and transparent, interpretable image traits have significant and independent pricing power: higher focal saturation, tighter compositional concentration, and greater curvature are rewarded, while clutter, heavy line work, and dispersed palettes are discounted; deep embeddings add limited incremental value once explicit traits are included. To assess state dependence, a Bayesian dynamic mixed-effects panel with cycle effects is estimated, allowing Composition Focus - Saturation - the ratio of saturation in the central region to the whole image, capturing vividness and concentration at the focal area - to vary across market regimes. Collection-level heterogeneity (brand premia) is absorbed by random effects. The time-varying coefficients exhibit clear regime sensitivity, with stronger premia in expansionary phases and weaker or negative loadings in downturns, while the grand-mean effect is small on average. Overall, NFT prices reflect both observable digital product characteristics and market regimes, and the framework offers a cycle-aware tool for asset pricing, platform strategy, and market design in digital art markets.
Harshvardhan Dixit, Paras Jain, Mukul Aggarwal, Divyanshu Shukla
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital assets stored digitally that define digital creative works or intellectual assets, such as the “soundtrack,” “digital artworks,” “games,” “animated gifs,” and “short video clips.” Fungible means to mention that an asset's units are all the same, interchangeable, and dividable.NFT marketplaces are online platforms that have the capability of transforming global interaction and ownership. Although there have been challenges, relentless innovation and collaboration have the potential to bring NFTs to full fruition. By engaging in regulatory, security, scalability, and valuation issues, the industry has the ability to facilitate and sustain mass NFT market use. The study concentrated on identifying several use cases for NFTs and analyzing their potential for creators in the marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to provide a foundational understanding of NFTs and their market applications. The current global market capitalization of NFTs is $60 billion, which is approaching the $100 billion global market capitalization of art.
This study examines how the historical development of web technologies and Korea’s digital transformation have shaped the structure of art consumption, situating the inquiry within broader socio-historical flows and institutional frameworks. The trajectory from the static information delivery of Web 1.0, to the interactive platforms of Web 2.0, to the semantic and relational information sharing of Web 3.0, and finally to the decentralization of Web3, extends beyond a mere technological evolution. In particular, the state-led informatization policies initiated in the wake of the 1997 IMF financial crisis, along with subsequent strategies such as the Digital New Deal, laid the institutional foundation for the digital transformation of the Korean art market. Within this context, the study traces the processes and changes in art consumption that emerged. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative, interpretive approach, drawing upon diverse secondary sources including academic studies, policy documents, news reports, and platform operation records. The findings demonstrate that web technologies have served as a primary driver of comprehensive changes in art—shaping modes of appreciation, systems of distribution, and extending further into assetization and financialization. Today, art consumption has been redefined to move beyond viewing and purchasing, encompassing decentralized experiences and transactions as assets via online platforms. This shift underscores the rise of platform-based relational consumption models and the structural incorporation of art into capital markets. The study’s significance lies in its diachronic analysis of how web technologies have impacted art consumption. Furthermore, by integrating perspectives from the histories of technology, policy, and art, it establishes a foundation for multi-layered inquiry into the transformations of art consumption and institutional frameworks.
People can purchase, sell, and trade the NFTs (non-fungible tokens) on an NFT marketplace. NFTs are one-of-a-kind digital assets recorded on the Blockchain. The market facilitates the buying and selling of digital commodities by individuals from all over the globe and allows artists to tokenize their creations to prove their legitimacy. Secondary sales and royalties provide creators with a reliable source of cash. At its core, the NFT ecosystem revolves around NFT marketplaces. Blockchain technology used to guarantee transparency and security, increase visibility for artists and collectors, and encourage community involvement. Incorporating community and social features, ensuring strong security measures, optimizing scalability and performance, adhering to regulations, and continuously improving are all tasks that need to be completed for an NFT marketplace. To ensure security and transparency, boost artists' and collectors' visibility, and inspire community interaction.
This study examines the evolving landscape of art patronage in India amidst the digital transformation, with a focus on the traditional and Non-Fungible Token (NFT) art markets. Drawing on data from the Artnet Art Market Report spanning from 2019 to 2023, the research employs quantitative analysis to compare sales volumes, average prices, regional distribution of buyers, gender representation, artist mediums, market sentiment, and platform dominance. Key findings include the exponential growth of NFT art sales volumes, the premium associated with digital artworks, and the urban-centric nature of NFT art patronage. Gender disparities in art patronage and the dominance of digital artists in the NFT market also emerge as significant trends. The implications of these findings underscore the importance of adapting to digital transformation trends, promoting inclusivity and accessibility within the art community, and leveraging digital platforms for growth and innovation. By bridging the gap between traditional and digital art markets, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the cultural, social, and economic implications of digital technologies in the arts.
As in many areas of talent and creativity, the field of musical talent and creativity has also entered into new debates with recent technological developments. In this study, I aimed to examine the transformative effects of blockchain technology and NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) on copyright management and the creation of “value” in musical creativity (within the music industry). This research comprehensively analyzes the structural inadequacies of traditional copyright systems and the transformative potential of blockchain-based solutions. The research model is based on a methodological synthesis of case studies and theoretical paradigms. The findings demonstrate that blockchain’s decentralized architecture and the unique nature of NFTs provide artists with greater autonomy over their intellectual property; smart contracts automate royalty payments, democratize financial flows, and restructure the creator-audience relationship by eliminating intermediaries. Case studies such as the electronic musician RAC and the decentralized platform Audius concretely show how this technological integration reshapes artistic production and distribution mechanisms. However, the existing legal frameworks lag behind technological innovation. There are significant challenges to be addressed, such as inconsistencies between national and international copyright laws and uncertainties regarding the legal status of NFTs. Blockchain and NFTs have the potential to transform the ontological structure of the music industry by offering creative control, transparent copyright management, direct fan engagement, and alternative income streams for artists. These technologies also carry the potential to evolve the music sector toward a more transparent, fair, and artist-centered model. Therefore, all stakeholders in the industry may need to adopt this technological transformation strategically. Nevertheless, the ecological impacts of blockchain-based copyright systems, including energy consumption and digital carbon footprint, must also be discussed from a critical sustainability perspective. In evaluating the value of musical talent and creativity, it is now essential for disciplines such as musicology, technology studies, economics, and law to work together and adopt a holistic approach to the evolving dynamics of the digital art economy. In this context, blockchain applications in the music industry are interpreted through the cultural, socioeconomic, and epistemological dimensions of the global digital economy — not merely through the lens of technological determinism but also from the perspectives of artistic autonomy and social justice..
The integration of blockchain technology and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) into Tanzanian art signifies a pivotal moment with transformative potential for artists, drawing on Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations Theory. This discussion explores the implications of merging blockchain and NFTs, focusing on themes like technological decentralisation, cultural empowerment, and associated challenges. Blockchain empowers artists by facilitating direct engagement with a global audience and eliminating the need for intermediaries. It also creates unalterable ownership records, giving artists greater control over their work. NFTs contribute to digitally preserving and sharing Tanzanian cultural heritage, increasing visibility and influence for previously marginalised voices on the international stage. Despite these promising opportunities, integration faces obstacles such as limited technological access and complex legal frameworks, which hinder wider adoption. Addressing these issues requires collaboration to reduce digital inequalities, promote understanding of blockchain technology, and strengthen legal protections. Ultimately, combining blockchain and NFTs could transform the Tanzanian art scene by amplifying cultural voices and protecting heritage in an increasingly digital world. Success depends on effectively managing challenges and capitalising on emerging opportunities.
“Creative” and “artistic” capitalism have been with us for a while. Yet something is wrong with them. We seem to be too stressed, too extracted, too invested in the time and effort and monthly subscriptions necessary for curating our public personae in “social” platforms. Back in the early 2010s, neoliberalism seemingly entered a stage in which its “artistic features” were sufficiently appealing to smooth over contradictions. It was as though everything the early avant-garde had once promised was finally coming about. Art was merging with everyday life, including a never-ending demand for originality (or what looked like originality), the articulation of a system of economic and social value based on flexibility and regulated transgression (gig work has its upside for creative types), and the celebration of previously marginalized cultural types (diversity, inclusion, and equity—even in an art world fundamentally structured by novelty, exclusion, and unpaid apprenticeships). But with this transformation soon came another realization. The aestheticization of politics that Walter Benjamin gravely forewarned about as a hallmark of fascism deeply stained artistic capitalism, as the mobilization of creativity became a driving force for urban gentrification displacing those apparently lacking the imaginative flexibility to surf the peaks and troughs of the new normal society of risk. Artistic capitalism and its promises began to stink. Something is wrong, and we are its pitiable symptom.We are not talking about the simple replacement of a mode of capitalism by something else, about an irreversible disappearance. Things are subtler than that. The artistic imperative, the emphasis on participation and experience, the anxiety linked to “like” economies and profile capitalism, are still there. Yet there are new things, too. Technofascism, for that matter: the normalization of the murderous combination of bio/necro/geopower control and authoritarianism. This is not your average nightmare: while artistic capitalism relied on psychosocial isolation, the performance of narcissism, and the establishment of hierarchies through a simulacrum of personal-realization-as-differentiation, this new thing does not care about how curating has become part of the vocabulary of professional and personal self-realization or about the interiorization of extractive mode(l)s of self-exploitation.The farewell to artistic capitalism also implies a farewell to the “human face” of late capitalism. The good news is that in this deeper circle of hell in which we are now, I/you/we don’t need to feel creative anymore. (In truth, I/you/we are so exhausted, disoriented, subsumed into survival mode that I/you/we can’t afford it. It seems that only the algorithm can keep the pace of “not-particularly-creative creative imperatives.”) The bad news is that the new landscape that is just materializing in front of our eyes seems vaster and gloomier than anything we have seen before.Recent debates on technofascism suggest that capitalism died in front of our eyes without us noticing. That necropolitics has been enhanced through its transposition into the policed digital-social now. That subject formation is again under attack and that inhabiting the non-normative implies being at the frontline. That “politics” does not exist anymore, because it has been replaced with memes and algorithms (as if the effects of these were not political and material and tangible). In any event, the exercise of coming to terms with the nightmares of our recent past should not be done to feed apocalyptic thoughts, nor to say that we occupy a worse position than what we occupied ten years ago. Rather, the challenge remains one of imagining the historical coordinates of both subjugation and flight, of capture and fugitivity; understanding what creative capitalism did to us, but also resisting its self-fulfilling, totalizing allure.“Creative” capitalism relied on the collective fulfilment of the equation art = life; technofascism is creative in different, darker ways. In this context, looking forward seems an imperative for basic survival. On the contrary, looking back seems more like a luxury, as a nostalgic gesture without important consequences for our crisis-driven present. “Forward” and “back” should, however, be relativized, as things have already happened, keep happening, in front of our eyes. Coming to terms with “artistic” capitalism should be seen as a complex operation, one that implies adjusting our temporal perception and challenging simplistic, self-predicted, apocalyptic visions of the end of the world. Could we look at the end of “creative” capitalism with creative eyes, to see something other than the replacement of a bad nightmare by a worse one? What is at stake in such a task? How might we accomplish it? Does it make any sense?Until recently, “creative” and “artistic” capitalism was something almost taken for granted. The use of the concept implied its naturalization as a prevailing force, as the new normal. Creative capitalism was the gentle touch making possible the financialization of everything, the “creative force” giving an abstract system a humane face. As such, the concept was so indissolubly linked with late capitalism that its specificity could be easily dismissed as part of the ideological apparatus naturalizing neoliberal ideologies. The loss of relevance of creative capitalism has paradoxically made its contradictions more visible than ever, as in a last desperate attempt to keep traction, to stay in the game.Writing in 1999, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello explained that late capitalism has been taking lessons from countercultural movements since the 1960s and applying these to increasingly profitable endeavors.1 For both authors, a new state of things was taking shape at the end of the 1990s, one marked by the commodification of difference, the interiorization of artistic critique, the diversification of market options and the transformation of services and social relationships into a resource. The confluence of these elements sought to simplify and facilitate control and surveillance. For Boltanski and Chiapello, however, the new spirit of capitalism failed at suppressing a sense of collective anxiety that prevailed over the superficial variations implemented. The clearest symptom of the inefficiencies of the “new spirit of capitalism” could be felt in the flesh, as it is related to the impossibility of being predicated on the flexibility and originality that “creative” paradigms demand. In a connectionist world, the tension between the requirement of flexibility and the need to be someone—that is, to possess a self endowed with specificity (a “personality”) and a certain permanency in time—is a constant source of anxiety. The slogan that sums up the ideal of a successful life as becoming oneself—that is, changing in order to bring out and discover what one potentially was, so that one is no longer the same person while nevertheless evincing conformity to an original self—is the typical expression of this tension.2Reading Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism in 2025, feelings of pessimism and even nostalgia seem to be unavoidable, especially in relation to the idea that the main obstacle blocking change has to do with critical and epistemological limitations, as if not knowing how to call this “new spirit” made it more menacing. In a postscript added in 2007 to the original book, the authors mention that the specificity of recent developments consists in the development of a connectionist logic, which does not mean that it has invaded the totality of the social world or that, in particular, connectionist exploitation has replaced other forms of exploitation. In our view, however, it is precisely the shortage of descriptions tailored to the uniqueness of this world that has hitherto prevented critique from being more effective.3Looking back fifteen years later, it is clear that we have plenty of descriptions dealing with the “uniqueness of this world.” We know well how global globalization was; how much liberation the celebration of creative freedom turned into an imperative of self-development brought. We have the information, but this has not helped us in preventing the damaging effects resulting from an excessive trust of connectivity and newness. Importantly, we can feel an exhaustion in the ways in which creative capitalism is researched and theorized, as if its normalization implied that some of its edgier features could no longer be appreciated and critically apprehended.In 2013, Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy wrote a less radical book, L’esthétisation du monde. Vivre à l’âge du capitalisme artiste, in which the authors defined artistic capitalism as the driving force of an exhausted neoliberal logic in constant need of reinventing itself.4 The key issue for both authors is the appropriation of the project of aestheticizing the world for capitalist purposes. The point for Lipovetsky and Serroy is not just the expansion of aesthetics, but rather its confluence with the domains of economics and finance, its indistinguishability. The collapse of design and experience, the acceleration and automation of consumerism, the development of platforms for mass-tailored consumerism: all these elements play a role in the conceptualization of this new version of creative capitalism. And yet, the most confusing, the most outdated element found in Lipovetsky and Serroy’s book is the idea of perfection, as if the only thing we needed to do is give capitalism enough time to perfect the formula, to tune up the algorithm, so that mass-consumerism-as-aesthetics resembles more the echo of a lost aesthetic grandeur.Reading L’esthétisation du monde in 2025, more than a decade after its first publication, is an interesting exercise. On one hand, things have changed significantly. But there is something else. It is worth noting that Lipovetsky and Serroy’s book was written at a time when artistic capitalism was not hegemonic, when non-individualistic modes of being in common were being put into practice by assembly movements and activist platforms all around the world. Part of the appeal of artistic capitalism as an idea lies in its character of self-fulfilling prophecy. The idea, in order words, is not just an idea; the concept comes with its own advertisement, as the ultimate commodity. In its soft apocalyptic tone, it is simultaneously anticipatory, and already outdated.It is particularly useful to think about artistic and creative capitalism as a remarkably persistent fictional tale, as a way of presenting things that anticipates its own triumph and parries any critical blows against it by justifying its presence as the best possible way of organizing everything. Artistic capitalism takes the glitter of the creative genius and presents it as universally reachable. The emphasis on blockages and frustration only adds up to the climax of self-realization. The interiorization of this fictional account that reduces sociality to the configuration of successful individuals works, because it works its way into the psychosocial texture, projecting its malleability as a sort of do-it-yourself tool kit that can be adapted and transformed for each particular case.Discourses on creative and artistic capitalism present “the thing” as a relatively new phenomenon, as something emerging out of the disintegrated fluxes of Fordism and late capitalism. In fact, the equation “creative self-realization = subject formation” can be defined more accurately as the central piece of a long-term occupation. Of biopolitics attempting to transcend the physical realm of the body to invade also the oneiric, the aspirational, the not-yet. We may, for instance, dust off the genealogies of the artist novel or Künstlerroman, in which becoming (subject, citizen, individual) is associated with becoming an artist, with orienting yourself and finding your way in relation to creative imperatives.5The artist novel—the genre that establishes the novel form at the center of modern literature; the specific form of Bildungsroman in which personal development and subject formation is achieved through artistic means; the body of work that glues together the canon of Western literature, from Balzac to Goethe, Joyce, Mann, Woolf—is not just a literary genre. Rather, we should read this body of work concerned with the coming-of-age of the individual as an artist as a socializing pact, as a particular way of imagining the world in which creative self-definition is always in reach, a path always available. Importantly, the artist novel is not just a literary genre. We should see it as a malleable genealogy that permeates cultural imagination, as a formula for subject-formation-as-individuation that involves novels, but also social media profiles, curated avatars, and the myriad ways in which self-appreciation and self-definition in creative terms are mobilized as socializing tools.The artist novel is not a tale about artists. It does not tell anything about anyone in particular. Rather, this body of fiction works by projecting the fantasies of artistic capitalism (long before such a concept existed) onto the reader, by narrowing the distance between emissary and receptor, producer and consumer. These narratives arise from the hope that realization is around the corner, that “if I could, you also can,” that the alliance between material progress and self-investment represent the perfect formula of success.In the artist novel, the possibility of imagining a life worth being lived is projected upon the reader. Artist novels are aspirational in at least two ways: first, they are concerned with moving off the beaten track, of fulfilling desire as a way of countering a dull and normalized bourgeois reality. Second, the kind of becoming depicted in the novel remains available, transferable, and applicable as a sort of toolkit that the reader can import and put into practice within the sanitized environment of the reading room. The artist novel produces capitalism through the fiction of subject formation and identification, through the accumulation of property made possible by a supposedly inexhaustible and expansive creative imagination.To be sure, this goes much further than any dream of perfect, polished cities powered by the force of a young class of cosmopolitan creative practitioners. We are talking here about a centuries-long experiment that works beneath the skin and repurposes all sociality to make it fit the equation of creative individualism = subject formation. Importantly, this is no longer (it never was) just about literature. Under the late stage of artistic capitalism, scientific progress is replaced by the advancement of “creative” socialization. Apps and user-friendly profiles are the new chemical formulas. Patents and proofs of concept are no longer the predefined terrain of scientific advancement; rather, they have been translated into the realm of the subject-as-profile, curated personae relying on the mobilization of inventiveness to constantly demonstrate that they belong to the group, that they are “in” instead of “out.” Ranking anxieties and technofascistic democracies have combined personal development with computerization and AI sovereignty.The issue with the artist novel and the pact it relies upon is that it is never stable. The process of becoming (subject, individual, citizen) that is promised and propagated through the artist novel is not static, is not about assuming any position. Rather, it is concerned with displacement, with the politics of pattern(ed) lives that are embraced and discarded, that are made fashionable and conceived of as worth being lived. In fact, we should look at the genealogy (fictional and otherwise) of the artist novel and its late capitalist ramifications as lifelines, as patterns that produce their own orientation. Sara Ahmed conceived of queer orientation as a phenomenological task concerned with “the politics of lifelines.” She explains that “following lines…involves forms of social investment. Such investments ‘promise’ return (if we follow this line, then ‘this’ or ‘that’ will follow), which might sustain the very will to keep going. Through such investments in the promise of return, subjects reproduce the lines that they follow.”6 Crucially, Ahmed foresees the possibility of getting lost, of starting new lifelines, while following any path.What is interesting is that the artist novel was always, also, an escape route. A way of being, but also a way of being in between different lives, diverse aspirations, even different eras and The appeal of artistic elements in fiction seems to from such here in How to with art the possibility of a In The the main character a with murderous and through the of In art and make the world in ways that challenge the In art is a for gentrification and but also for a that together and in subject formation and are part of the same equation under creative capitalism, such a formula capture the to and put into practice art or thing is that these art are not just they are also, more than could also say here a that simultaneously how “creative” capitalism can and how and the genealogies of creativity We may, about the a canon as a and instead look for a malleable of creative challenging the idea of subject formation as the only way of being and We look the glitter of “creative” capitalism to see the the work of that was always already there materializing in front of our is not life, that is being These are the by not the of we that we were That our implied how we were in the normalization of the of consumerism, of the That becoming an individual becoming creative in extractive ways. But what if the of could to a different to the formation of radical the of subject formation under creative capitalism are murderous isolation, we could also say that the end of creative capitalism paradoxically about the of possibility for radical can only when the of artistic capitalism are should not be seen as we should see this historical as one for the task of we should the of in ways still not still for collective capitalism was predicated upon a of through the from Fordism to Western achieved the dream of the merging art and But what if the point was not about but rather about and What if the task of imagining art implied a task of and the configuration of “new political subjects of the to What if creativity as a form of being and becoming was always already about the of and about collective well be the that technofascism is an important part of our collective but this does not everything. the terrain emerging in front of our eyes is but it is to a self-fulfilling with another The challenge is to while to see past the murderous of capitalist or making sense of the genealogy of radical that to and past and present forms of The in other words, is to change and as a of this the collapse of creative capitalism could be seen as an into the is not a just the of something else, something still to
Minutes before visiting Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), I was perched by the window of a coffee shop, attempting to back up my iPhone to my laptop. I needed to make space for the photographs of the exhibit I knew I would be taking—indeed, that I considered an essential prerequisite to writing about it at all. Naturally, my phone froze with a spinning circle on the screen and refused to turn back on. At the conveniently nearby Apple Store, a cheerful employee suggested that rather than waiting for an appointment with tech support, I could buy a new phone and return it later if my old device regained consciousness. And since I wanted the phone for photos, I might as well try the Pro. And so it came to be that I spent my time at Digital Witness carefully wielding a $999 camera, swiping away notifications about all the smart ways it could now document the world around me. Erase unwanted objects! Enhance in-frame audio! Record in 3D! Digital witnessing indeed.My new device seemed to encapsulate the many ways digital technologies have changed our relationship to witnessing—making possible ubiquitous capture, establishing new burdens of proof, aesthetically transforming the actual images through automated computational means. To my surprise, however, the witness referred to by the show was not digital photography, as I had assumed, or social media, as in the St. Vincent song that the curators cite as their inspiration for the title. Instead, the witness is the show itself, which observes and narrates the revolutionary growth of digital software from the age of the personal computer onward. In an essay concerned with the kind of digital witness I gripped in my hand, although written at the dawn of the iPod, John Durham Peters explains the notable slipperiness of the word “witness,” which refers to both a person, an act of seeing, and the testimony of what was seen.1 Witnessing comes with a three-piece set of historical baggage, Peters claims, in the form of its ties to law, theology, and atrocity, each of which ties witnessing in some form to deep moral and cultural forces, and most primordially, to questions of life and death. Digital Witness observes some trends in digital art from the age of the personal computer to the age of the personal feed, yet the question that dogged me throughout was: does it bear witness?This question feels particularly urgent given the long history of anxiety about digital images as witnesses. In a 1993 Los Angeles Times op-ed, media critic Brian Stonehill suggested it was no wonder a Simi Valley jury did not convict Rodney King’s assailants. Why should they believe the video of King’s beating when all year they had been assailed by commercials showing Humphrey Bogart hawking Diet Coke and Michael Jackson music videos filled with figures transforming race and gender? Three decades later, as synthetic media and AI-generated images flood our feeds, such early skepticism about digital witnessing seems less paranoid than prescient.The three areas of revolution witnessed in curators Britt Salvesen and Staci Steinberger’s exhibition, per the subtitle, are design, photography, and film—an already unusual grouping that proves insufficient to contain the actual works on display. The painter Lee Mullican’s digital drawing and Casey Reas’s custom software programs, for instance, fit more squarely within the absent term “art.” The intended unifier across these domains is the rise of digital tools, although the curators acknowledge these are far from the only areas affected (one could include music, fashion, and architecture, for example). This focus on tools permeates the exhibition catalog, where the Q&As peppered throughout all begin with each artist’s first experience manipulating digital images. The best answer comes from Reas, who evokes Tangrams, Lite-Brite, and cross-stitch, emphasizing the difference between digitality and computational technologies—an important elision in the show, which understands “digital” simply as the adjective form of the noun “computer.”Like Salvesen’s earlier LACMA show 3D: Double Vision (2018–19), the work in Digital Witness spreads broadly into visual culture. Also like 3D, one of the most compelling parts of the exhibition is the ability to experience the antiquated technologies firsthand. A row of Amiga 500s with Andy Warhol’s digital drawings pulsing across the screen is a highlight. But 3D was more narrowly focused, centered around the specific evolving fantasy of replicating reality in its dimensional richness rather than the tools developed to facilitate it. Encountering the richness of the myriad creative attempts to achieve this impossible idea was what made it interesting. Digital Witness lacks such a unifying concept, interrogating neither the digital nor the witness nor the tool. If this exhibition serves as a continuation of Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982, LACMA’s 2023 show on the origins of computer art, it expresses all the narrative awkwardness of a sequel.If I appear to be taking too much issue with the categorization, it’s because the work itself is largely illustrative of the processes and tools that interest the curators in this anthropological endeavor. What organizes the show is three aesthetic moves that appear throughout the work on display: blur and sharpen (digital realism), morph and warp (computer aesthetics), and cut and paste (digital collage). The framing here situates us within premade software (Photoshop, most obviously) rather than in the world of coding, though some of the work is made through coding rather than premade tools. The video clip is dominant throughout. Screens play scenes from various sources, giving snippets of Jurassic Park, Björk music videos, dancing baby gifs. Several expected representations appear: Andreas Gursky’s crowded scenes, Takeshi Murata’s glitch art. Some omissions are surprising—graduate school seminar favorites Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, and Harun Farocki are missing, though four of Zach Blas’s “fag face masks” from his Facial Weaponization Suite (2012–14) make an appearance.Wandering through an exhibit filled with short clips gives the impression of walking through a digital feed, and the curation encourages that same passive state of absorption. The one work that knocked me out of my trance was Brian Bress’s Dune Medallions (2018). Nothing about the work needs to be digital—he could have shot it on film—but it embodies the processes and disorientation of the digital, making it strange again. Over the course of the video, shapes are cut out of a collage of photographs and illustrations of desert landscapes (a desert of representation?). The artist works from behind the collage, becoming visible through the holes that emerge at the same time the reverse side of the collage appears in pieces left dangling. He wears a camouflage costume that replicates the foreground collage. The various layers that emerge—the dangling paper cutouts; the flat desert collage; the moving, camouflaged body—trouble distinctions between surface and depth, movement and stasis. The work’s vertical orientation speaks to both the once-condemned, now de rigueur portrait orientation of mobile video and the human scale of the portrait. The labor of imagemaking is masked by the work itself, the artist only appearing in glimpses as holes are cut in the paper, but it is nevertheless made visible. As he continues to cut into the image, what initially seem to be mere graphic shapes turn into medallions of a sort. These serve as reminders of an alternative system of meaning, a return to the use value of images as religious icons, specific and nonfungible, yet the presence of Bress’s robot-like figure in disguise challenges such self-serious interpretation.The flattening of design, commercial filmmaking, and photography obscures what’s at stake with the growth of digital tools. The issues raised by AI are not absent—standing in for the phenomenon of deepfakes is, oddly, a video featuring a deepfake Mark Zuckerberg—yet these issues are, somewhat fittingly, lost in a sea of other screens competing for our attention. The unaddressed phenomenon of the digital here is the democratization of images: text, photographs, and film all become digital images, while black morphs into white in the Michael Jackson video or the Nancy Burson composite. The politics of this flattening enacted by the computer go unaddressed by either artist or curator. In the catalog’s Q&A, the answers to the repeated question of what is lost in the conversion to digital are illuminating, ranging from blanket denial (“I can’t think of anything that was lost after switching from analog to digital”) to sentimental nostalgia (“perhaps spontaneity”; “a sort of ‘warmth’ or ‘charm’”). A kitschy aesthetic of lime green and steel throughout the galleries gives the feel of a Nickelodeon studio tour in the 1990s rather than an important locus of inquiry. That artificially glowing green continues into the catalog, where its ubiquity results in the disorienting yet poignant experience of looking up from the texts to encounter a real-world tinted rose.In the digital revolution, the camera’s status as witness has been one of the primary concerns of media scholarship and the popular press. The general trajectory has been one of panic (“Images are losing esteem everywhere, and why? Because we have more control over them than ever.”2) followed by a recalibration (digital images understood as “radically breaking with older modes of visual representation while at the same time reinforcing these modes”3) to a new reassessment with generative AI. As witnesses to the digital, what have artists had to say? As viewers of this art and visual culture, what should we think? The exhibit neither celebrates nor condemns, but rather meekly taxonomizes, samples, and entertains.Wandering the galleries in the hazy days between Donald Trump’s second election and his inauguration, the existential threat that “digital tools” now present to democracy was top of mind. Days after I visited the exhibition, the CEOs of Adobe (a sponsor of the exhibit), Apple, and Microsoft each pledged $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. As I write this, Elon Musk’s teams are worming their way through federal data sets, witnesses to the sensitive information of institutions and individuals. “To witness an event is to be responsible in some way to it,” Peters writes.4 Once we have witnessed, we cannot honestly say that we did not know. What responsibilities are kindled by this exhibit, this witnessing of the digital? Exiting the exhibition, my gleaming iPhone still in hand, I stood to watch installers mocking up the adjacent Imagining Black Diasporas exhibit.5 Printer paper delineated where the sleek vinyl text (digitally designed, no doubt) would go. Curation and polish produce the veneer of comprehension, of control, suggesting to us that this work, this world is understandable. The seams of this process, the labor that goes into them, reminds us that this work is done by mere mortals like us, and we all can and indeed do have the responsibility to engage in the always unfinished processes of meaning making. As I snapped a picture, a guard told me no photography was allowed of the installation process. This moment was foreclosed for witnessing, digital or otherwise.
This article examines the impact of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on contemporary digital culture. Purpose. It aims to understand the role of NFTs from the perspective of the hybridization between art and social sciences, evaluating their applications and intersection with different cultural formats. Methodology. A critical and exhaustive literature review was conducted, applying inclusion and exclusion criteria through the PRISMA protocol to ensure the validity of the analyzed studies. Results and conclusions. Findings suggest that NFTs have high potential to transform digital culture by enabling new forms of ownership, authenticity, and interaction across industries such as art, music, and gaming. However, they also pose challenges regarding regulation, sustainability, and financial speculation. Original contribution. This study highlights the relevance of NFTs in today’s creative industries, assessing their feasibility as a cultural management tool and their role in redefining the concept of digital ownership within a decentralized environment.