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

Original Author: vangoya, NFT Analyst

Original Translation: Felix, PANews

Most people in the crypto space think NFTs are obsolete.

In the art world, most people think NFTs are a scam, briefly fooling some Hollywood celebrities and crypto founders in Singapore before fading into obscurity.

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

• "It's just a JPEG."
• "I can right-click and save your million-dollar monkey."
• "NFTs are a scam, just pump and dump random animal pictures."

If you've been online since 2021, you've definitely heard these three phrases, and maybe even said them yourself.

But all these claims are wrong, and the data clearly shows it. I really don't understand why no one points this out publicly.

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

The NFT market is currently around $2 billion, down roughly 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 been quietly building infrastructure over the past four years for something they claim is "already dead."

This isn't a "pump" article that tells you your favorite PFP floor price will 50x. This article will provide an in-depth look at:

• What the gatekeepers of the art world did while everyone was focused on price charts.
• Why every major art movement 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 size is $59.6 billion. This figure comes from the 2026 report by Art Basel and UBS. The report is authored by Dr. Clare McAndrew, the most respected analyst in this field for over a decade.

By NFT standards, this number is huge. But here are some truths about this number that no one tells you:

• Stagnant Growth: Down from the 2022 high 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 shrinking for over a decade.
• Extreme Value Concentration: In public auctions, works priced over $1 million account for less than 1% of lots but represent 54% of total value.
• Wealth Transfer: The report also highlights an upcoming major turning point: "the great wealth transfer." Over the next two decades, more than $80 trillion in assets will pass from Baby Boomers to their descendants.

Read that "1% of lots represent 54% of value" again. The traditional art market isn't a true $60 billion market. 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 efficient tax avoidance tools.

And this top-end market faces a problem: buyers are aging, dealers are aging, and the infrastructure is aging. The young people inheriting the $80 trillion did not grow up browsing Sotheby's catalogs.

They grew up in the internet age.

So, before discussing NFTs, please understand: the so-called competitor of NFTs is not a thriving, expanding market. It is an aging market with serious centralization issues, facing a generational transfer where the inheritors don't want the old stuff. And this is what people call a "safe asset."

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

Now, let's look at how those who control the art world actually put their money to work.

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

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

• A few artists create a new form of work.
• Critics mock, collectors ignore.
• A few brave curators include these works in institutional collections.
• Other museums see the acquisitions and follow suit.
• Auction houses sense the institutional shift and start selling these works.
• Top galleries sign these artists.
• Prices rise over the next generation.

That's the established playbook. It works for photography, video art, and installation art. It has worked for every medium the art world initially deemed "not real art."

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

Here are some examples of permanent collections by major museums:

• Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York: In 2023, MoMA acquired Refik Anadol's work Unsupervised. The piece was displayed in the museum's lobby for nearly a year, attracting 3 million visitors. The acquisition includes a companion NFT and a blockchain souvenir for visitors to mint. The same year, MoMA also acquired Ian Cheng's 3FACE, a generative NFT that reads its owner's wallet contents and changes accordingly. This conceptual piece couldn't exist without blockchain.
• Centre Pompidou, Paris: In 2023, it acquired 18 NFTs from 13 artists. The collection includes works like CryptoPunk, Autoglyph, and pieces by Sarah Meyohas. Curator Marcella Lista described it as a natural extension of their holdings of masters like Bruce Nauman.
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA): Holds one of the world's most authoritative collections of on-chain art. In February 2023, collector Cozomo de' Medici donated 22 generative and blockchain artworks, including a CryptoPunk, Dmitri Cherniak's Ringer, and a work by Tyler Hobbs. This is the largest blockchain art donation received by a US museum to date. Additionally, Art Blocks founder Erick Calderon donated the final version of Chromie Squiggle, the genesis work of the entire on-chain generative art movement, directly to the museum. LACMA also established the first fund within a US museum dedicated solely to digital art by women artists.
• Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami): Was an early mover, accepting a donation of CryptoPunk #5293. In 2022, Yuga Labs gifted a second Punk, launching the "Punks Legacy Project" to bring CryptoPunks to major museums globally.
• 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: Hosted the exhibition "Peer to Peer" in late 2022, the first blockchain art exhibition at a US museum. A historical note from the curators 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.
• Guggenheim Museum: In 2024, it exhibited Jenny Holzer's Light Line, a 900-foot rolling 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 have formally committed to digital and blockchain art within the last four years.

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

3. Every Art Movement You Take Seriously Today Was Initially a Joke

This is the part crypto enthusiasts often miss, but the art world generally understands.

In 1863, the official French exhibition, the Paris Salon, rejected over 2,000 paintings. Due to the volume of rejections and outcry, Napoleon III ordered the establishment of the "Salon des Refusés" (Exhibition of Refused works). People flocked to see it, but to laugh. Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was the centerpiece, called vulgar by critics.

Today, the painting is considered a foundational work of modern art, housed in the Musée d'Orsay. Its value, if sold, would be incalculable.

In 1874, a group of artists rejected by the official Salon held their own exhibition. A critic used Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise as a taunt, coining 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-dominant Old Masters. Sunflowers sold at Christie's for nearly $40 million.

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

This lag is a necessary path for every art revolution, without exception.

This doesn't mean artistic recognition always takes a century. Rather, ridicule 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, to publicly mock the show, displayed actual Campbell's Soup cans with a sign: "Genuine, 29¢." Only five of the 32 paintings sold. Gallery owner Irving Blum eventually bought the entire set back for $1,000.

Those 32 soup can paintings are now among MoMA's most prized possessions. One painting from the series sold privately for over $9 million.

That grocery store is 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." At the time, the art world largely dismissed it as fringe philosophy. Early conceptual artists deliberately created uncollectable works—protocols, instructions, certificates—partly to critique the gallery system. They tried to escape the market.

Sol LeWitt's auction record is now over $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.

Now, look at the timeline for these arts to be born. The following should be eye-opening:

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

Seven years.

Impressionists had held eight exhibitions before the world even knew what to call them. The first NFT artists are still creating. Most of them are still alive. Most of them are still at the mid-career stage. The same playbook used to price Manet, Van Gogh, Warhol, and LeWitt is now quietly being applied to them.

It took decades for Impressionism to go from ridicule to a multi-billion dollar market. Conceptual art faced similar resistance.

The pattern is: a new medium emerges, mainstream society dismisses it, a large community of creators and collectors embrace it, institutions follow, and then capital flows in.

NFTs are already developing 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 then. But his description perfectly applies to smart contracts.

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 control who gets into museums and textbooks. They are the most conservative players in the art world, signing artists only when they believe that artist will matter in 50 years.

Pace Gallery: Founded in 1960, representing the estates of Rothko and Sol LeWitt—the artist with the strongest conceptual link to NFT art. In November 2021, Pace launched Pace Verso, a dedicated NFT and Web3 platform. Since then, they have released NFTs by many of their high-profile artists:

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

Look closely at that list. These aren't crypto-native artists. These are established names in contemporary art releasing their first NFTs through one of the top three galleries.

Then, in March 2023, Pace did something even more significant. They gave Tyler Hobbs, a generative artist who rose through on-chain art, a solo show at their flagship New York gallery. Twelve large paintings derived from his QQL algorithm were exhibited in the same space as Rothko and Calder.

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

Pace giving a solo show to a generative NFT artist wasn't a publicity stunt. 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 work.
• Gagosian accepts cryptocurrency payments.
• Sotheby's launched a dedicated metaverse marketplace in 2021. Since launch, NFT sales have exceeded $100 million, and they continue to pay artist royalties even as most of the market dropped them.
• Christie's launched Christie's 3.0 in October 2022, the first fully on-chain auction platform by a traditional auction house.

Auction houses and top galleries don't have to do this. They have plenty of business without crypto. They do it because the smartest people in the most conservative corners of the art world have looked at the data and concluded that the collecting trends of the next 25 years will happen here.

5. The Incontrovertible Data

Mike Winkelmann created a digital artwork every day for thirteen years and posted them online, mostly to crickets. He had a small following, no gallery representation, no museum interest, and zero standing in the traditional art world.

Yet, in March 2021, Christie's auctioned a file compiling all 5,000 images, which sold for $69.3 million. His handle is Beeple.

Now, let's put 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 instantly became the third highest-valued living artist in global auction history.
• Pak, The Merge: Achieved a staggering $91.8 million in sales in 2021. It is arguably the highest public auction total for a living artist, though the comparison is debated due to the work being sold in multiple units.
• Beep