Traditional art is aging, and NFTs represent the next Medici moment

Original Author: vangoya, NFT Analyst

Original Compilation: Felix, PANews

Most people in the crypto space believe NFTs are over.

In the art world, most people believe NFTs are a scam, briefly fooling some Hollywood A-listers and Singaporean crypto founders before fading into obscurity.

Then there is a third group, also the loudest, which has been repeating the same three sentences for four years:

• “It’s just a JPEG image.”
• “I can right-click and save your million-dollar monkey.”
• “NFTs are scams, just a pump-and-dump scheme for random animal pictures.”

If you’ve been online since 2021, you’ve heard these three lines, maybe even said them yourself.

But these takes are completely wrong, and the data makes it clear. I honestly don’t understand why no one is publicly pointing this out.

In 2025, the traditional art market had a turnover of $59.6 billion, up 4% year-over-year, but still below its $67.8 billion peak in 2022.

The current NFT market size is roughly $2 billion, down about 90% from its peak. On the surface, you’d say, “Right, NFTs lost.”

But you can’t just look at the surface. Because the entire art world – including museums, top galleries, auction houses, and the most seasoned collectors – has spent the last four years quietly building the infrastructure for what they call a “dead” thing.

This isn’t a “pump” article telling you your favorite PFP floor price will moon 50x. This article will take you deep into:

• What the gatekeepers of the art world were doing while everyone else was fixated on price action.
• Why every major art movement in history was ridiculed for decades before being recognized.
• Why the bearish case for NFTs simply doesn’t hold up.

1. The Market You Think is Unshakeable is Actually Shrinking

The traditional art market is worth $59.6 billion. That’s the figure from the 2026 report by Art Basel and UBS, authored by Dr. Clare McAndrew, the most respected analyst in this field for over a decade.

By NFT standards, that’s a huge number. But here are some truths about that number no one tells you:

• Stagnant Growth: Down from the 2022 peak of $67.8 billion, declining for two consecutive years before a slight rebound.
• Mid-Market Shrinkage: The market for works under $50,000 has been contracting for over a decade.
• High Value Concentration: In public auctions, works selling for over $1 million represent less than 1% of lots but account for 54% of total value.
• Wealth Transfer: The report also points to a major upcoming inflection point: the “great wealth transfer.” Over the next two decades, more than $80 trillion in assets will pass from the Baby Boomer generation to their descendants.

Read that “1% of lots accounting for 54% of value” line again. The traditional art market isn't really a $60 billion behemoth. It's roughly a $30 billion market for the masses, plus a $30 billion “super casino” at the top where billionaires trade Basquiats and Picassos as a highly efficient form of tax avoidance.

And this top-tier market has a problem: its buyers are old, its dealers are old, and its infrastructure is old. The young people inheriting that $80 trillion didn't grow up browsing Sotheby’s catalogues.

They grew up on the internet.

So, before discussing NFTs, let's be clear: The so-called competitor for NFTs isn't a booming, expanding market. It's an aging market with severe centralization issues, facing an intergenerational transfer where the heirs don't want the old stuff. And this is what people call a “safe asset.”

In the high-end market, veteran collectors are increasingly focused on legacy management, liquidity, and succession, rather than discovering new artistic mediums.

Now let's look at what the people in charge of art have actually been doing with their own money.

2. While You Weren't Looking, the Gatekeepers Acted

The art world has a very specific mechanism for legitimizing a new artistic medium. The process is as follows:

• A few artists create a new form of work.
• Critics mock it; collectors ignore it.
• A few brave curators include these works in institutional collections.
• Other museums, seeing the acquisitions, follow suit.
• Auction houses sense the institutional shift and start auctioning these works.
• Top galleries sign these artists.
• Prices appreciate over the following generations.

This is the established playbook, applied to photography, video art, and installation art. It works for every medium the art world initially deemed “not real art.”

And this same playbook is currently unfolding for digital art and on-chain art. Most people don't know that the early stages have already quietly happened.

Here are some works that major museums have added to their permanent collections:

• Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York: Acquired Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised” in 2023. The piece hung in the museum’s lobby for nearly a year, attracting 3 million visitors. The acquisition included a companion NFT and a visitor-mintable blockchain souvenir. Also in 2023, MoMA acquired Ian Cheng’s “3FACE,” a generative NFT that reads its owner's wallet contents and changes over time. This conceptual artwork could not exist without the blockchain.
• Centre Pompidou (Paris): Acquired 18 NFT works from 13 artists in 2023. The collection includes a CryptoPunk, an Autoglyph, and works by Sarah Meyohas, among others. Curator Marcella Lista described it as a natural extension of the museum's holdings of masters like Bruce Nauman.
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA): Holds one of the most authoritative collections of on-chain art globally. In February 2023, collector Cozomo de’ Medici donated 22 generative and blockchain-based works, including a CryptoPunk, Dmitri Cherniak's Ringer, and works by Tyler Hobbs. This is the largest blockchain art donation ever received by a US museum. Additionally, Art Blocks founder Erick Calderon directly donated the final version of Chromie Squiggle, the genesis of the entire on-chain generative art movement. LACMA also established the first US museum fund dedicated to digital art by female artists.
• Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami): An early mover, accepting the donation of CryptoPunk #5293. Yuga Labs gifted a second Punk in 2022, launching the “Punks Legacy Project” aimed at placing CryptoPunks in major global museums.
• The Whitney Museum of American Art: Has been quietly collecting digital and net art for years, with two works by Rafaël Rozendaal in its permanent collection. They have operated a digital exhibition platform called Artport since 2001.
• Buffalo AKG Art Museum: Held the “Peer to Peer” exhibition in late 2022, the first blockchain art exhibition at a US museum. A historical note from the curator is worth remembering: In 1910, the same museum hosted the first photography exhibition at a US museum. In 1910, photography was still not considered art, three-quarters of a century after its invention.
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: Exhibited Jenny Holzer's “Light Line” in 2024, a 900-foot-long scrolling LED installation incorporating AI-generated text.

The Centre Pompidou, MoMA, LACMA, ICA Miami, the Whitney, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and the Guggenheim together form the institutional backbone of contemporary art in the US and Europe. All of them have made formal commitments to digital and blockchain art in the past four years.

Those who aren't paying attention will tell you institutions don't care. But in reality, these institutions are already publicly in. The market ignores it only because floor prices dropped.

3. Every Art Movement You Now Take Seriously Was Once a Joke

This is the part crypto people often miss, but art people universally understand.

In 1863, the official French exhibition, the Paris Salon, rejected over 2,000 paintings. Due to the volume of complaints, Napoleon III ordered the establishment of the “Salon des Refusés” (Exhibition of Rejects). People flocked to see it, but to laugh. Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” (The Luncheon on the Grass) was the centerpiece; critics called it vulgar.

Today, this painting is considered a foundational work of modern art, housed in the Musée d'Orsay. If it were ever sold, its value would be incalculable.

In 1874, a group of artists rejected by the official Salon held their own exhibition. A critic singled out Monet’s painting “Impression, Sunrise” for mockery, using the term “Impressionists” as an insult.

The name stuck. It later became one of the most important movements in history.

It wasn't until 1987, over a hundred years after the Salon des Refusés, that a Van Gogh painting broke the auction record for a modern artwork, surpassing the long-standing dominance of Old Masters. “Sunflowers” sold at Christie's for nearly $40 million.

Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime. Today, his works routinely fetch over $100 million at auction.

This lag is the unavoidable path of every artistic revolution, without exception.

This doesn't mean artistic recognition always takes a century. It means mockery precedes recognition, institutional adoption follows, and market repricing comes last.

Take Pop Art. In July 1962, Andy Warhol’s “Campbell's Soup Cans” exhibition opened at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. A neighboring store, in a public act of mockery, displayed actual Campbell's Soup cans in its window with a sign saying “Real ones, 29¢.” Only five of the 32 paintings sold. Gallery owner Irving Blum eventually bought back the entire set for $1,000.

Those 32 soup can paintings are now among MoMA’s most treasured possessions. One of the paintings from the series was privately sold for over $9 million.

That grocery store has been long forgotten.

Take Conceptual Art. In 1967, Sol LeWitt published “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” in Artforum magazine. Its opening line: “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” The art world at large considered this fringe philosophy. Early conceptual artists deliberately created works that couldn't be easily collected – protocols, instructions, certificates – partly to critique the gallery system. They tried to escape the market.

Sol LeWitt's auction record now exceeds $1.6 million. His wall drawings are in major museums worldwide.

Conceptually, a wall drawing is like a smart contract. Someone writes the rules; someone executes them. The “art” exists within the protocol.

He invented the framework for on-chain generative art fifty years before there was a blockchain to run it on.

Now look at the time it took for these arts to emerge. The following section should be an eye-opener:

• Impressionism: 124 years from mockery in 1863 to the first record-breaking modernist auction in 1987.
• Pop Art: Roughly fifty years from being mocked in a grocery store in 1962 to permanent collection at MoMA in the late 1960s, eventually selling for millions.
• Conceptual Art: About 35 years from its 1967 manifesto to auction prices exceeding one million.
• NFT Art: Quantum, widely considered the first NFT, was minted in 2014. CryptoPunks launched in 2017. Christie's held its first major NFT art auction in 2021. That's seven years.

Seven years.

The Impressionists held eight exhibitions before the world even knew what to call them. The first generation of NFT artists are still creating. Most are still alive. Most are still in the middle of their careers. The same playbook used to price Manet, Van Gogh, Warhol, and LeWitt is now quietly being applied to them.

It took Impressionism decades to go from being ridiculed to being valued in the billions. Conceptual art faced the same resistance.

The pattern is: A new medium emerges, mainstream society dismisses it, a critical mass of creators and collectors embrace it, institutions follow, and then the money pours in.

NFTs are already moving faster than any art movement in history.

“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” – Sol LeWitt, 1967

He was talking about wall drawings. But the description fits smart contracts perfectly, too.

4. Top Galleries Have Already Voted with Their Feet

If you want to know which artists will be in the history books 20 years from now, don't look at auction prices, look at which galleries sign them. Pace, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth – these galleries control who gets into museums and textbooks. They are the most conservative participants in the art world, only signing artists they believe will still matter in 50 years.

Pace Gallery: Founded in 1960, representing the estates of Rothko and Sol LeWitt, the artist most conceptually linked to NFT art. Pace launched its dedicated NFT and Web3 platform, Pace Verso, in November 2021. Since then, they have collaborated with many of their established artists to release NFT projects:

• Jeff Koons (sculptures sent to the moon)
• Maya Lin
• Trevor Paglen
• teamLab
• DRIFT
• Tara Donovan
• Lucas Samaras
• John Gerrard
• Loie Hollowell
• Leo Villareal
• Random International

Look closely at this list. These aren't crypto-native artists. They are established figures in the contemporary art world releasing NFTs through one of the top three galleries for the first time.

Then, in March 2023, Pace did something even more significant. They gave Tyler Hobbs – a generative artist who rose through the on-chain art ecosystem – a solo exhibition at their flagship gallery in New York. Twelve large-scale paintings from his QQL algorithm hung in the same rooms that had shown Rothko and Calder.

The QQL Mint Pass had sold for $17 million the previous September. A month later, during a crypto bear market, its secondary market value spiked to $28 million.

Pace giving a solo show to a generative NFT artist wasn't for show; it was a vote.

This is not an isolated case:

• Lehmann Maupin became the first commercial gallery to accept cryptocurrency.
• Hauser & Wirth exhibited Jenny Holzer’s NFT-related works.
• Gagosian accepts cryptocurrency.
• Sotheby’s launched its dedicated metaverse marketplace in 2021, with NFT sales exceeding $100 million since inception, and continues to pay artist royalties as most of the market abandons on-chain royalty payments.
• Christie’s launched Christie’s 3.0 in October 2022, the first fully blockchain-based auction platform from a traditional auction house.

Auction houses and top galleries didn't have to do this. Their businesses were doing just fine without crypto. They did it because smart people in the most conservative corner of the art world looked at the data and concluded that the next 25 years of collecting will happen here.

5. The Hard Data

Mike Winkelmann created one digital painting every day for thirteen consecutive years, posting them online to almost no audience. He had a small following, no gallery representation, no museum interest, and no foothold in the traditional art world.

Then, in March 2021, Christie’s auctioned a file containing a mosaic of all 5,000 of those images for $69.3 million. His internet name is Beeple.

Now, let's bring all the data together.

• Beeple, “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”: Sold for $69.3 million at Christie's in March 2021. This was the first purely digital NFT artwork offered by a major auction house. Beeple jumped to being the third most valuable living artist in global auction history.
• Pak, “The Merge”: Achieved a staggering $91.8 million in sales in 2021, arguably the highest public sale figure for a living artist,