The flaccid afterlife of the art NFT

I am in an elevator in New York, rocketing towards the rooftop bar of a highrise in the Meatpacking District. I glance at the two women who are sharing the ride with me: slick-back buns, Lululemon leggings, mini Kellys. Not exactly the mulletted, androgynous New York art scene crowd I had been expecting. I double check my phone: this is the right building, and I am about to step out onto the right floor. The elevator doors hiss open and I follow the women onto a rooftop scene that looks less like a gallery opening and more like a Soho House spillover: neon uplighting, half-zipped tech vests, the ambient buzz of five different apps trying to be “Instagram for art.” There’s even a Zyn pop-up stall, for Christ’s sake. 

“I thought you said this was a contemporary art event.” I hiss at my point of contact, who I find knocking back martinis opposite a large banner advertising BMW’s latest AI-powered satnav. 

“It is!” he cries. “What, the future isn’t fungible enough for you?” 

The realisation hits me like a freight train. God forgive me, I’m at an NFT event.

Last time I wrote about NFTs, it was 2022, and I was at Bonhams. The auction house  was a late joiner to the art world’s let’s-take-this-seriously party; Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days had sold for a staggering $69 million at Christie’s about a year previously. Bonhams’ response was to digitalise Philip Colbert’s Lobster series and host a very curious panel composed of Tinie Tempah, Dylan Jones, Bonhams’ head of digital and Colbert himself. I described it then as “an attempt at dressing [an] infantile market up in its big boy suit,” and I stand by that still. 

And we fell for it, hard. For a brief, chaotic window the border between “serious” art and speculative tech was extremely thin: Jenny Holzer created an NFT based on a screenshot from a Tucker Carlson show, Marina Abramović released one based on her 2001 performance, Urs Fischer continued his CHAOS series, Takashi Murakami launched Murakami.Flowers on OpenSea. Damien Hirst’s The Currency (2021–2022) remains the most iconic NFT project: 10,000 spot paintings were sold as NFTs, with collectors forced to choose between keeping the physical work or the digital token.

These projects were all rapidly abandoned (just as Abramović’s 2024 skincare line was, a 1 am ‘semi-ironic’ purchase I am disputing with my credit card company to this day). This was partly a result of institutions and art press overhyping the potential of the format: MoMA curator Michelle Kuo produced a hilariously optimistic interview with Seth Price titled ‘What NFTs Mean for Contemporary Art’, which touted the assets as “the logical conclusion of Conceptual art” but in the same breathe admits that “nobody really understands what the hell is going on”. This kind of highbrow hedging, of bold proclamations followed by nervous disclaimers, defined the moment. Everyone wanted to be ahead of the curve, but nobody could explain what the curve was.

What we are now seeing is the wretched coagulation of the few semi-ironically palatable elements of early NFT culture – the boyish bombast, the libertarian slickness, the desperate insistence that this was the future of art – into something deeply flaccid.

In May, a new nonprofit called the Infinite Node Foundation acquired the full intellectual property rights to CryptoPunks from Yuga Labs. In their words, the acquisition marks a new era of “museum-grade conservation” and “evergreen endowment.” In my words: somebody has realised that pump-and-dumping millions of dollars into monkey JPEGs doesn’t scream cultural legitimacy unless you staple it to a heritage foundation. CryptoPunks were once touted as the ur-NFTs, avatars of decentralised culture and proof-of-concept for a new creative economy. The language of the press release is eerily familiar to what I received in 2022 about Bonhams and Colbert: curators, scholars, collectors. What we are seeing now, especially at culminative events like this, is retroactive grafting of cultural value onto a speculative asset class now seeking post-crash legitimacy. No one’s actually collecting; they’re just trying not to be the last one left holding the bag. 

At the New York event, one man corners me by the rooftop bar and when I tell him I’m an art critic, he pulls out his phone and excitedly explains how his ex-girlfriend had “failed to understand the artistic merit” of his latest mint. I stare at a row of pixelated anime girls with huge tits. “Yeah man, great stuff,” I say, backing away. “Very Perrotin.” He pulls me into a hug before offering me a bump in the bathroom. “It’s community,” he says, unzipping a miniature silver pouch. “That’s the point.” 

Indeed, much of the male fervour around NFTs can be traced to three key instincts. Firstly, this allure of community and the euphoric chaos of online spaces like r/wallstreetbets: the sense of collective rebellion, of being part of something (however incoherent) that might beat the system. They offered an ongoing group fantasy: that through sheer conviction, volume, and inside jokes, a tribe of underdogs could outwit institutions and write their own rules. We see this exacerbated today with LinkedIn garble and breathless, faux-egalitarian startup jargon.

Secondly, the collector impulse: Bored Apes, CryptoPunks, Lazy Lions, Colbert’s lobsters all fed into the Pokémon-era dopamine loop of scarcity, accumulation, and self-branding. The average Western 18-to-35 year-old male was essentially brought up on the logic of the avatar economy: Pokéemon, Digimon, sports trading cards, Runescape armour sets, video game skins. NFTs didn’t invent collectible culture but their coterie certainly exploited a demographic already susceptible to gamification tactics. 

Thirdly, and perhaps most telling, was the lack of regulation. Web3 offered a libertarian sandbox where artworks could be speculative, sexually explicit, or outright unhinged with no institutional oversight. You could (still can, I suppose) mint porn, cartoon characters, political violence, fetishism, whatever you wanted, and call it transgressive. 

But when this dopamine dries up – no press, celebrities or auction houses have paid any serious attention to NFTs since 2023 – you’re left with these bizarre, claudicant forums. I went to another NFT-adjacent gathering in London last month because I’m a kind soul and a close friend asked me to support her ‘Women in Crypto’ talk. I go, I take advantage of the very generous open bar, I listen attentively to her speak about decentralised wealth and gender equity on the blockchain until a man in the front row interrupts to ask if her digital asset company has “considered taking a more active role in supporting online sex workers.” I corner him after the talk and ask him what the fuck his problem is. He explains that he’s working with a well-known adult content website to produce an NFT series based on the 1000 participants of Bonnie Blue’s latest stunt. I tell him I write about art. He says, “Same.”

Afterwards, I look around the sea of gilets and vapes and ask my friend what she thinks women gain by being a part of the scene. She pauses. “Access, mostly,” she says. “Funding. It’s not perfect but it’s still easier to get something made here than through the bloody Arts Council.” 

She’s not wrong, and maybe that’s the tragedy of it. The broader art market, desperate for youth, liquidity, and some vague sense of relevance, welcomed NFT culture not because it respected it, but because it was too afraid to look like it didn’t understand it. What felt in 2022 like a failed but feverish performance of innovation has, by 2025, congealed into a kind of ambient embarrassment: the same libido is still there, but it’s more desperate now. Someone’s still explaining Web3 to a woman who didn’t ask. Someone’s still talking about $EGIRL and the Dimes Square crowd. And someone, God help me, is still inviting me.