This week’s featured collector is jtzlm
jtzlm is a digital content creator. Take a look at their collection at lazy.com/jtzlm
Last week’s poll revealed something telling about where NFT collectors believe the real power shift in the art world is happening. With “Trad art is chasing crypto clout” and “Institutions have digital FOMO” tied at the top, the community is clearly reading Tad Smith’s pro-blockchain pivot not as an isolated curiosity, but as evidence of a deeper institutional recalibration. In other words: when a former Sotheby’s CEO goes all-in on digital ownership, collectors interpret it less as personal conviction and more as a signal that the old guard is quietly repositioning itself around the future.
In short, the poll signals a community that isn’t waiting for permission from the art world—they’re watching the art world catch up.
The Book That Rebuilds NFT Culture from the Ground Up
For anyone who has lived through the rise, crash, and strange afterlife of NFTs, Robert Alice’s On NFTs feels less like a book launch and more like a reclamation. At nearly 700 pages, this new Taschen tome rewrites the story many collectors know too well: that NFTs were “just cartoons,” a passing speculative fad, or a crypto blip with no cultural weight. Instead, Alice—artist, researcher, early NFT historian, and co-architect of Oxford’s first academic NFT conference—maps out a deeper, older, and far more consequential history. His argument is simple but radical: NFTs aren’t an art style; they’re an infrastructure shift. Digital art was only the opening act.
Alice reminds readers that NFTs have a 50-year technological lineage, and their purpose was never limited to PFPs or meme culture. In his view, NFTs are a modern successor to the printing press—low-cost, decentralized, and capable of transforming how people publish, own, and exchange cultural objects. That could mean artwork, yes, but it could also mean deeds, collectibles, documents, or anything that requires proof of ownership in a digital world. For a space that’s often dismissed as frivolous, Alice reframes NFTs as a foundational tool for the future logic of identity, value, and verification.
But the book isn’t theoretical. It’s filled with an unexpectedly rich visual history of digital creation—from early computer compositions by A. Michael Noll to Rafael Rozendaal’s museum-shown generative work, Anna Ridler’s formative AI-driven NFTs, generative WebGL pieces, and the experimental blockchain-native art of Leander Herzog, Kim Asendorf, Shl0ms, Roope Rainisto, Jack Butcher, and many others. The book’s images make a point that words alone can’t: NFTs contain multitudes. Some pieces mirror fine art traditions, some manipulate the logic of code itself, and some push the boundary between artwork and game mechanic. As Alice notes, many works in the book engage collectors not just as buyers, but as participants—sometimes even co-creators. That shift alone has changed the psychology of collecting.
Alice highlights artists like Sam Spratt, whose Monument Game made collectors part of the artwork’s logic and progression, or Butcher’s Checks, which turned mass participation and game theory into the work’s defining structure. These are pieces where blockchain isn’t merely a certificate; it’s the medium. For seasoned collectors, this may feel familiar—NFTs as experiments in authorship, ownership, and community—but Alice’s curation reveals how broad and serious that experimentation has become.
The book also arrives at a moment when institutions are catching up. MoMA, the Whitney, LACMA, the Centre Pompidou, and the Monnaie de Paris have all begun acquiring blockchain-based art, mirroring the recent “institutionalization” of Bitcoin itself. That parallel isn’t lost on Alice: as crypto becomes accepted as an asset class, blockchain art is moving through the same normalization curve. Yet he notes that UK institutions still haven’t taken the leap—a gap he expects to close as curators recognize how deeply blockchain narratives are shaping 21st-century culture.
One of Alice’s most striking points concerns AI. In a world where synthetic media can mimic anything, the question of authenticity becomes existential. “There is no world with AI without NFTs,” he argues. When images, videos, and even identities can be generated infinitely, collectors—and society at large—need mechanisms for provenance. How do you prove an image is real? How do you prove an artwork came from a particular artist rather than a model? NFTs, he suggests, are the only scalable answer. And if AI becomes the dominant creative force, he asks, what system would an AI rather interface with: a permissioned, human-gatekept gallery ecosystem, or a permissionless blockchain?
For NFT collectors, On NFTs offers something rare: a narrative that restores depth and legitimacy to a space often caricatured by outsiders. It argues that digital collecting is not a deviation from art history but a continuation of it—driven by new tools, new generations, and new definitions of ownership. It’s an invitation to see NFTs not as a market cycle but as part of a technological and cultural lineage that’s still unfolding.
In a bear market, that perspective matters. It reframes collecting not as chasing hype but as participating in a long arc of cultural and technological change. And for many collectors, that’s the real reason they’re here—not for apes or generational wealth, but for the evolution of digital culture itself.
Learn more at ItsNiceThat and Taschen.
Poll: Do books like Robert Alice’s On NFTs help legitimize collecting NFTs?
We ❤️ Feedback
We would love to hear from you as we continue to build out new features for Lazy! Love the site? Have an idea on how we can improve it? Drop us a line at info@lazy.com