Notes from the Avant NFT Underground

Over the last two years I’ve become infatuated with, and deeply entrenched in, a niche internet art community that is ever-increasing in popularity. As what’s come to be known as Avant, or “Gay”, NFTs generate more attention, there is growing interest in categorizing the artists and projects involved and detailing the stylistic methods that unify the movement. But documenting the Avant NFT movement can be difficult. 

To know this world is to live on the timeline, to be in more Twitter group chats than you care to, and to understand the history and personal conflicts that make this scene as much of a pro wrestling-style soap opera as it is a new branch of contemporary art. 

Avant NFT collections are aesthetically aware, guided by humor and the absurd, and similar to Fluxus in being definable according to their conceptual approach and network rather than a single style. The community consists of digital and performance artists, painters, sculptors, writers, and traders often in collaboration. This is an international digital art movement where persona is medium, and the anonymity of the internet allows artists to have multiple projects under different names, and to work as collectives in the name of a single creator. 

The term “Avant NFT” itself was a tongue-in-cheek comment first coined by the artist Super Metal Bosch in a Twitter post on January 25, 2022. The thread contains memes and images from artists and projects, including Bonkler (2023) and Milady Maker (2021) by Remilia Corporation, Spiky DJ (2022) by FPBJPC, J48BAFORMS (2021) by GROTTO LABS, TOJI 100 (2022) by Tojiba CPU Corp, as well as images of Bosch’s own projects.

More recently, the scene has come to be known as “Gay NFTs” based on a Twitter exchange between new art program and Tojiba Brand Manager, who declared that calling things “avant” has always been “pretty gay.” The name stuck. While juvenile, the name reflects the transgressive nature of the scene. It has also been viewed as a gatekeeping device to deter both homophobes and people who are easily offended. After all, if you are offended by calling something “gay” you probably won’t appreciate the nonchalant use of images of the World Trade Center burning, jokes about fentanyl, or casual use of the word “retarded”.

Avant NFT culture is artist-focused and more concerned with creative output and dialogue than in generating a return on investment. This is best exemplified in the long-standing tag line of Spiky DJ of “never minting out.” What might be viewed as failure in other NFT communities is worn as a badge of honor. 

A project by the collective, FPBJPC, Spiky DJ exemplifies the scene’s underground nature and diverse repertoire with feet in both the digital and mainstream contemporary art worlds. Spiky DJ work can be found in galleries, public restrooms in Berlin, and on the blockchain. Their influence is evident in the spikey headphone traits incorporated into such collections as Mifella (2022), DriFella (2023), and Little Swag World (2024). Nevertheless, despite their massive influence, no Spiky DJ collection has ever minted out. 

Many of the artists involved in Avant NFTs produce both digital and physical artwork, and Galerie Yeche Lange has become a vital channel for sales of both. The initial, online-only iteration of the gallery launched in 2022, its team comprising curators Milo Conroy, Jared Madere, and Wretched Wurm alongside editor Anastasios Karnazes and developer Miles Peyton. The artworks they sold were minted on Ethereum, while the interface for exploring works and exhibitions was an innovative web-based viewing environment. 

In the Spring of 2024, the gallery’s format and personnel changed, with Yeche opening a new space in New York primarily for the display of physical work. In early 2025, Yeche built a launchpad for Solana NFTs called VVV.so. Since its launch, artists such as Evil Biscuit, Gremlins 2 Official, Parker Ito, Jim Spindel, and Time have released collections. Although the platform is not curated, it has drawn increased attention to the Avant NFT community for its customizable minting pages.

Most Avant NFT collections use automated image generation to create layered, trait-based images similar to profile picture projects (PFPs) such as CryptoPunks (2017) and Bored Ape Yacht Club (2021). But in many ways, Avant NFTs are a reaction to PFP projects that, while populist and financially successful, are viewed by some as corporate, soulless, and lacking in artistic nuance.

The flagship project of Remilia Corp, Milady Maker — better known simply as Milady — launched in August 2021. 

Through the artwork of Henry Sprite and the performative character of its leader, Charlotte Fang, Remilia was able to take a PFP collection, build an ideology around it, and develop a cult-like community following. 

If the Miladies express Remilia’s visual identity, then the combined force of the collective, its social posting, and ideology brings it closer to a total work of art. Yet, since its inception, Remilia and its leader have sustained several controversies while growing their reach far beyond the world of NFTs. 

In the Spring of 2022, Twitter users connected Charlotte Fang to a series of anonymous accounts with a history of racist, anti-Semitic, pro-anorexia, and pro-suicide posting. While Fang claimed it was part of the construction of a “performative identity”, key investors and collectors left the collective, and the community of artists who had gathered around Remilia fractured. However, despite its negative associations, it is impossible to ignore Remilia as a foundational project in the lineage of Avant NFTs. 

The most significant response to Milady is Mifella, which emerged as a derivative commentary on Milady that set off a succession of projects that inform much of what the Avant NFT space has become. 

‍Mifella is a project about Milady, but whereas Remilia is primarily a social performance, Mifella is an exercise in experimental aesthetics. 

While it represents a response to Milady, Mifella has made bold leaps forward in the way it uses digital layers to disrupt subjects, often by completely obscuring the central character. Mifella wears T-shirts from niche Japanese noise musicians, incorporating art historical references from Vito Acconci to Gutai. Further collections build on the aesthetics of Mifella as a separate subset known as Cuckcore. 

Although Mifella is a single account, there are many Mifella artists and anyone can claim Mifella and launch a Mifella collection. Like Spiky DJ, Mifella and its affiliated artists also create paintings and drawings, which have been exhibited internationally with individual pieces sold directly through their website.

As the Cuckcore projects have grown, the central Mifella figure has become increasingly distorted and abused. At this point, Mifella has been born, died, had his soul fused with a dead Pokémon to create DriFella, and dissolved completely, leaving nothing but a chair.

‍Mifella projects exemplify the chaos of Avant NFT collections. Layered, maximal collages combine originally rendered assets with appropriated images referencing art history, video games, fashion, memes, and historical NFT collections within the Avant lore. 

Avant artists and collectives are also in the habit of making their digital assets available for others to use in their own projects, resulting in a self-referential and exponentially expanding visual culture — a Katamari Damacy of internet art. New collections often push images to the limits of formal superabundance through what has been termed “trait maxing” or “schizocollage.”

Image-generation protocols such as HashLips are often used by the community to generate artworks randomly based on layers provided by artists, thereby introducing the element of chance. This technological spin on Surrealist automatism has resulted in collections that ape the aesthetics of cubist collage as well as the original DADA movement. Examples of popular recent collections that use HashLips include Drilady by Parker Ito and Drifella III by Evil Biscuit.

Other projects rely more heavily on storytelling and universe-building. Cigawrette Packs (2022) is a case in point, whose pared-down imagery belies its rich lore and strong community engagement. Each anthropomorphic pack is considered by its maker, Pappachaga, to be a literary project, providing a blank warning label to be filled with custom text via a free online image generator. More than 90 brands of fictional cigarettes exist in this ever-expanding universe that blends visual art with alternate reality gaming.

The work of Super Metal Bosch is similarly clear and refined, interweaving physical objects with digital sculpture. Early collections such as Super Metal Mons! (2021) were created through the use of GANs (generative adversarial networks) modeled on thousands of images of small toys, including keshi collectible miniatures that are popular in Japan. Data from those figures has been fused to generate new outputs, then minted as NFTs on Ethereum. 

The GAN-generated characters from Super Metal Mons were subsequently fabricated in cast porcelain, evolving into a chess-like board game that is also playable online. Mons characters reappear in Bosch’s popular Solana collection, Little Swag World, which was built using a combination of photoshopped assets and Stable Diffusion. 

Like many Avant NFT artists, Bosch uses a combination of AI and custom editing to push the PFP format beyond the characteristic family of avatars.

While some Avant NFT projects are on the Ethereum blockchain, the community is centered on Solana, which has been criticized for being overly centralized and for its association with venture capital (including the now-collapsed FTX Trading Ltd.) as well as concerns about unfair token distribution and market manipulation, consequently being looked down on by Web3 artists and collectors who consider Ethereum to be the gold standard for NFTs. Yet like grassroots art scenes such as Hic Et Nunc that grew up on the Tezos blockchain, Solana has the benefit of speed and low transaction costs along with a vibrant DeFi and memecoin ecosystem that gives artists the means to generate liquidity beyond the sale of their art.

Though some artists in Web3 have tried to distance themselves from crypto’s “degen” associations, some members of the Avant community use memecoins as both a creative outlet and as a means of supporting themselves. Fairybaby420 creates memes and NFT collections for coins including XAVIER and CRYPTO as an extension of his visual art practice. The Mifella community has also turned to “farming airdrops,” harvesting promotional launch coins from websites including the trading platform Jupiter and the staking protocol Jito, to generate liquidity. All of these tactics provide artists with a means to make a living while making art. 

One consequence of these alternative revenue streams as well as a lack of collector attention is that minting costs for Avant NFTs have, until recently, been inexpensive.

Trading has also functioned as a muse, with Earl adopting it as their subject, producing oil paintings of red and green candle charts that express market movement and the emotion tied to historical financial and geopolitical events. In addition to painting, they also write “trader fiction” that combines their “interests and experience in art, trading, crypto, history, and literature.” These fictional series refer to Mifella, DriFella, Tojiba, and other related projects, while several NFT collections use images of Earl’s paintings as traits. 

In recent months, Avant NFTs have received increased mentions on weekly podcasts and Twitter spaces hosted by prominent platforms such as Verse, while collectors from Ethereum and Tezos are learning more about the movement. 

Avant projects that might have taken months to mint out are now selling out instantly. There is more speculation, and the secondary markets are gaining greater attention. The result is that it’s no longer like trading zines at a basement punk show or buying bootleg Grateful Dead shirts in a parking lot. 

As this Avant-garde goes mainstream and artists begin to repeat the styles of previous projects, new collectors may not draw a distinction between the formative creators and those following trends. Given the movement’s derivative sensibility, however, it feels well defended from the increased attention. Having seen the space evolve over the last two years, I have faith that the artists on which it was founded will continue to challenge convention.