This week’s featured collector is MoneyMansi
MoneyMansi has a curious collection of wide range of NFTs. Lots of stuff we’ve never seen before. Check it out at lazy.com/mansi
Last week’s poll came back strongly optimistic: 78% of you said yes, this first generation of digital-native collectors will permanently move digital art into the art-world mainstream, while 22% said no. What’s interesting isn’t just the confidence—it’s the word permanently. That suggests many of you see this as more than a cycle of hype; you’re betting on infrastructure and habit change (screens at fairs, digital frames at home, onchain provenance, online-first discovery) becoming normal—whether or not “NFTs” stays the label the art world uses.
The Identity Crisis of NFT Art—and Why It’s Not Over
Isabelle Castro’s essay “The end of the beginning of NFT art” (in Utopia in Beta) is a useful read if you’ve felt the mood shift from 2021 mania to something quieter—and you’re trying to figure out what, if anything, actually changed in the art world because of NFTs.
She frames the current moment as an identity crisis: the wider art industry often treats NFTs as a punchline, even as the 2021 boom arguably did something lasting—pulling art buying and selling deeper into online culture, widening access for creators and collectors, and introducing a mainstream mechanism for authenticity and ownership in digital work. Castro opens with a scene from Art Basel Miami where Beeple’s robotic dogs “poop” paper NFTs that random onlookers can take home and claim online. It’s imperfect, she notes (you still have to be physically present and lucky), but it spotlights the contrast between a gatekept market where single works sell for millions and a model where witnessing can be rewarded—some of those NFTs later trading for tens of thousands.
From there, the piece zooms out into a short history that’s especially helpful for collectors who want more than the usual “NFTs started in 2021” timeline. Castro connects NFTs to earlier conceptual and computer art threads (think instructions-as-art and art-as-currency), then traces early on-chain experiments like Bitcoin’s embedded messages, Rhea Myers’s MYSOUL (2014), and Sarah Meyohas’s Bitchcoin (2015). She flags Kevin McCoy’s Quantum as a watershed: blockchain as a way for digital work to be widely shared while still being ownable with provenance.
One of the essay’s strongest sections is where she names the contradictions that collectors live with every day: prices of “blue chips” falling hard while crypto markets roar; artists who once rejected institutions now returning to them for auctions and promotion; mass accessibility existing alongside ultra-expensive drops; and the breakdown of creator royalties (she cites OpenSea dropping enforced royalties under fee pressure). She also offers a sharp lens on what replaced the old “aura” of originality: in NFT culture, reproducibility becomes an advantage, and “buzz” (likes, retweets, clout) becomes a form of consensus—until price intimacy starts to dominate everything.
Castro is at her most convincing when she gets specific about how NFTs expanded the map of who gets seen. She uses the example of Nigerian artist Osinachi, who made work in Microsoft Word at internet cafes and was dismissed by galleries—then found collectors by uploading NFTs to OpenSea, effectively routing around traditional gatekeepers. She also highlights how on-chain mechanics shaped new forms of art-making, like Pak’s Merge, where the smart contract rules and collective behavior become part of the artwork itself, and how collector DAOs attempted (with mixed results) to broaden participation and reduce curatorial blind spots.
But she doesn’t romanticize it. A recurring point is that gatekeeping didn’t disappear—it multiplied and shifted. Platforms that began open moved toward curation, allowlists, and invite systems (SuperRare is one example), which can improve quality and sales while also drifting away from the original “anyone, anywhere” promise. Her closing argument is basically: even if the hype doesn’t return, the medium may still be in its early chapters. Digital art has been legitimizing itself since the 1960s; NFTs added an immutable authenticity layer and a programmable substrate that can reflect networked interaction. The way forward, she suggests, is continued building—where critique takes the form of creation, and the infrastructure improves through collaboration between artists and technologists.
If you’ve been treating the post-2021 era as a comedown, this essay is a better frame: not the end, but the end of the beginning. It’s worth reading the original for the historical through-line, the concrete examples, and the way it holds both optimism and skepticism without slipping into either hype or dismissal.
Read the full article here:
Poll: Where do you land on NFT art right now?
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