March 2021 will forever be remembered as the month that NFTs went kaboom, bursting into the mainstream when Beeple’s Everydays: the First 5000 Days sold to crypto entrepreneur Metakovan for $69.3 million. Suddenly, the art world was noticing and, overnight, NFTs became the mostly hotly debated subject of the year.

From SNL to Snoop Dogg, NFTs quickly took popular culture by storm. Athletes and celebrities aped-in; some shilled and rug-pulled their fans. Others made genuine contributions to the space, like when Grammy award-winning producer Timbaland made NFTs of stems to his beats—buyers were given the rights to remix and profit from them.

Now, most of that initial hype has collapsed, thanks in part to the cantankerous crypto market. Pieces once bought for millions now barely muster a couple hundred thousand at auction. The auction platforms are not doing much better: OpenSea, the largest of them all, laid off 20 percent of its staff in July 2022. Sales volume is significantly down. An extremely muted sale earlier this year of generative art (digital art made with autonomous software) at Phillips showed that collectors are no longer as keen.

As the NFT art market faces a recalibration, what will become of the market for digital and physical art—the so-called “phygital”?

Για περισσότερα δες εδώ.