On NFTs | An Affordable Edition for Scholars and Curators

Robert Alice (editor), On NFTs, is published by Taschen (US$50 or £40 sterling).

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The artist and writer Robert Alice’s book On NFTs (2024), a catalogue raisonée of non-fungible tokens, with artist profiles, timelines, glossaries of terms and scholarly treatises by leading scholars of digital art, has been republished by Taschen in a revised, 656-page edition, priced at US$50 or £40.

The new release comes 19 months after the publisher first issued the book as a large-format 604-page Collector’s Edition, priced at $850 or £750, with a Hard Code Edition, in a sculpted, perforated, stainless steel slipcase built from letters and numbers, and weighing in at 14.6kg, or 32lb, for double the price again.

“The title On NFTs is inspired by the art-historical and cryptographic tradition of the treatise," Alice writes in the book’s introduction, "exemplified best by the Renaissance artist, art historian, and cryptographer Leon Battista Alberti’s two treatises De Pictura/On Painting (1450) and De Cifris/On Ciphers (1466).” When On NFTs was first released in 2024, at the same time as Right Click Save published its book of new media genealogies, situating developments in the sector within an expanded understanding of art, the two books were greeted by the technology consultant Chris Michaels, writing in The Art Newspaper, as combining “to provide the first comprehensive history” of the form.

One of the great things about Taschen’s business model, Alice tells Right Click Save, is that the publisher does “both ends of the spectrum really well. They do the high-volume, low-cost book really well, and they do the low-volume, high-cost book really well.” The trade edition has a page area one quarter that of the Collector’s Edition, requiring some reordering of page design, and tips the scales at just over one-fifth the weight. The original editions had a separate 24-page booklet with QR codes for linking to moving-image art, a section that is integrated with the rest of the book in the trade edition.

The new edition carries the same cover artwork, but new endpapers, 11 new artist profiles, and additional photographs to update the section on the history of NFT exhibitions.

The new edition was launched during Art Basel Paris at the Taschen bookshop in the French capital and is the subject of a book-signing at Heft Gallery in New York on November 19, the day after Alice’s BLOCK 1 (24.9472° N, 118.5979° E), a painting connected to an NFT from the series “Portraits of a Mind”, is offered at Sotheby’s in New York, by an owner who bought it from the artist. The work is from the same series as Alice’s BLOCK 21 (42.36433° N, -71.26189° E) which was sold by Christie’s New York in October 2020, marking the first time an NFT had been transacted through an auction.

In March 2025, the Centre Pompidou acquired Alice’s 382181_Garden City, from the Blueprint series unveiled in the exhibition “Babel I”, mounted at La Monnaie de Paris in 2023, by Marlène Corbun, the curator of the art platform LaCollection. 382181_Garden City was the third work by Alice to enter the National Collection of France, and the first to do so by formal financial acquisition. Corbun and LaCollection helped in placing the work.

Alice has one work in the digital wallet of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); three held by the Centre Pompidou and five acquired by the Monnaie. In March-April 2025, Alice and Corbun put on “Babel II”, the second stage of the exhibition at the Monnaie, where Stasis Fields — a new group of works from the Blueprints series, made up of speculative images of explosions which explore the relationship between blockchains and time through the idea of the singularity and its association with black holes. Drawing on blueprints in the Monnaie archives, the works were displayed alongside works from Babel I that are now part of the museum's collections (Virunga (on long term loan) and Ornament & Crisis). 

In the context of their creative engagement, as artist, writer and art historian, with the institutional, market and scholarly history of crypto art, Alice spoke to Louis Jebb, Managing Editor of Right Click Save, about the new edition of On NFTs and the state of play in the creation, selling, and collecting of digital art on the blockchain.

‍Louis Jebb: How does the new, smaller, trade edition of On NFTs compare with the weighty large-format editions launched in 2024?

‍Robert Alice: The Collector’s Edition was fun, and it was sexy, it was really nice to do. I think it lent the NFT space a little bit of legitimacy. I think people were kind of amazed by it, not necessarily because of the book, but because of Taschen’s backing.

The educational, art historical value of the book starts now, by getting it into as many people’s hands as possible. Curators, young collectors, artists, students, can pick up the book and they can learn.

In some ways, the whole thing feels stronger and better in the new edition. It’s been updated a little bit. The model was to create a book with two competing perspectives: in one, you work on a text that has a long shelf life, on how the book will be interpreted in 15 or 20 years; from the other side you bring the book together as a faithful portrait of a certain period in time. And those competing perspectives mean the work will stack up, I think, really well in 20 or 30 years’ time. The other interesting thing will be to see, when examining it as a historical document in decades’ time, how far we will have moved away from those original perspectives.

The book costs 40 quid and it’s 656 pages long. It is jam-packed with information. And if you want to understand the history of digital art on the blockchain for £40, you will find a whole education in it. I think it’s thorough and constitutes good value. While £40 is not cheap — book prices have gone up a lot — I think it is affordable. The book contains a huge amount of data and information for people to mull over.

As with all such compendiums, you ask yourself the question, “Who will be around when dust settles in 50 years’ time?How will the race be won, historically?”

And that will be very interesting. The beauty of the book was that while I’m sure there are names in it that will go on to write their names in art history, that is not the main point of On NFTs. The main point is that there are a number of artists in there that have made significant or small local contributions to their communities or exemplify many of the assets of what, from a more Utopian point of view, an NFT can be; what digital art on the blockchain can be. That is having a small community of people and selling directly to them. 

‍LJ: I see there is a QR code section in the new edition.

‍RA: That’s in the back of the book. So now with any moving-image work, you can scan the QR code and go directly to the decentralized file. In the Collector’s Edition it came in a separate 24-page catalog and that’s now been folded into the book. So now it’s one complete object. So that, assuming the blockchain works, in 50 or 60 years’ time people will be able to go to the book and explore these things.

‍LJ: How do you react when you are asked, as you were in 2024, “Why make a physical book on a digital subject?”

‍RA:  I think it’s nice to have this physical abstraction [in the form of a book]. 

Books have been tested over hundreds of years. They don’t need to be changed. And the technology hasn’t changed.

They’re good ways of digesting something quickly without having a thousand screens up. There’s so much discussion placed on the idea of curation and discovery for NFTs. What is the balance between curation and openness, especially when you’re on a permissionless blockchain? I think from a discovery point of view, the book is a compendium, an overview, a reference book.

‍LJ: What about the generative algorithm end papers? Are those new to this edition?

‍RA: For the endpapers, the first set [in the Collector’s Edition] were outputs from the SOURCE [On NFTs] algorithm [which was created in parallel with the first edition of On NFTs as an “artistic twin”, trained on datasets of 30 texts associated with the history of NFTs as well as the 2,500-year prehistory of democratic and libertarian writing, cryptography and science fiction — from Laozi’s Tao-te Ching (around 400BC) to Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin Whitepaper (2008) and including George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)]. In the new edition, the endpapers are actual outputs from that algorithm made at Christie’s New York in March 2024. One of the outputs is from the Centre Pompidou’s collection, and the other from another collector’s collection.

They are ultimately an art project, but they are also a piece of design. They sow the seeds of what we’re trying to achieve with a physical book on a digital medium: by giving this physical object the character of the algorithm.

So that when a reader opens up the trade edition and sees two different endpapers, two different outputs, that will maybe get them to think in a slightly different way as they approach the book.

‍LJ: The original edition of the book carried 100 artist profiles, refined down from a long list crowdsourced through the NFT community. You have added 11 new artist profiles to the latest edition.

‍RA: They are all artists that were missed, where we made mistakes, or artists that have created significant projects over the last couple of years, or indeed artists that were featured in the book as references, but were not given a full spread. There are new artist profiles of Anna Ridler, Rutherford Chang, Operator, Leander Herzog, Kim Asendorf, Schloms, Roope Rainisto, Sam Spratt, Joe Pease, theVERSEverse and Jack Butcher. Roope Rainisto is more AI work; for Rutherford Chang it’s Ordinals. Kim and Leander are on-chain projects linked to gaming; theVERSEverse, especially with Sasha Stiles’s MoMA exhibition, reflects the rise of digital poetry; and with Sam Spratt, the idea of the collector as collaborator. And then Schloms with AI agents. He had a token called Nothing, which was a big thing.

‍LJ: How about the differing art world climate or atmosphere for NFTs between 2024 and 2025? How do you think it has changed?

‍RA: We’ve got a little bit more critical distance now and I think we’ve refined direction in terms of the way that the community approaches the concept of digital art.

I think maybe that 2024, ironically, was possibly the worst time you could launch a £1,500 book on NFTs. It was peak NFT bear market.

I think liquidity has come back, although I don’t think it’s come back that much into NFTs. I think probably NFTs will skip a cycle, maybe even two, until the space grows to the point that there’ll be people that want to start re-collecting these old bits of historical culture.

I think this idea that digital art was going to be some major part of crypto is misled. NFTs and digital may have been the first chapter for crypto more generally. Crypto will have failed if art was its big market, though it’s indicative of the importance of art to humanity that it was its first major secondary market.

I don’t think we’re in that much of a different position to that in 2024 except that we’ve had an increasing institutionalization which is covered in the book. We’ve now got exhibition images from the Pompidou, images from MoMA, images from Serpentine, in the book’s exhibitions section, which I think really does add a next [level to] this chapter. It opens up a possible future. And I think the quality of the projects, of the 10 new exhibition projects that have been added, speak for themselves. They are very strong projects. 

But this is a generational adventure. I actually think that this book will be more relevant in 30 years’ time than it is today. That there’ll be more people interested in it in 30 years’ time than in five years’ time.

Not from the perspective of its growing exponentially, because that sounds obvious. More from the perspective of audience comfort with digital art. I think there’s a world where it could be very quiet for a very long time. But I think there will be a number of unlocks where blockchains get to a certain latency, and digital skills get to a certain latency and people have a certain level of greater comfort, which is a generational thing. I don’t think the great masters of digital art are even born yet. 

I think this book as a record will be approached in future much as we now approach early Vera Molnar work or early Herbert Franke, because the information in On NFTs has been laid down at a certain time, with a certain perspective. And because art is so slow. It’s a generational thing. I think it’s still a very lively market today, a lot of people are interested in things and, if projects are really good they find an audience.

But I think that NFTs, or digital art, won’t fulfil their potential for another generation. I don’t think we’re the generation that will fulfill that potential.

‍LJ: You said that digital art may have been the first chapter in crypto, but may have been the smallest. Could you elaborate on that?

‍RA: What happened was that — maybe it was the fault of the media, maybe it was the fault of everybody — but there was this kind of technological optimism, in 2021-22, that completely blinded onlookers. Even in the title of the book. “On NFTs” makes sense because that’s the recognition, that’s the meme, but maybe the title of the book should have been “On Digital Art”. It would have been a better title because NFTs are just technology. It’s like saying that everything on a piece of paper is art.

From a mainstream perspective, the great benefit of blockchains is a kind of cultural flattening. But that also means that sophisticated digital art ends up sitting next to memes, to collectibles, and to pictures of monkeys. That’s the perspective that most people know because that’s the thing that hit the news; the perspective that people take away from it. And actually, it shouldn’t be.

I think as real-world assets come on to blockchain as NFTs, if that happens, there will be art and digital art, and digital art NFTs will be some minuscule percentage of all NFTs.

‍LJ: Do you think the new, cheaper, edition of On NFTs will reach a different readership?

‍RA: Yes, if you are a collector or critic or curator or student. The one thing that I can say anecdotally is the amount of requests I get from graduate students or undergraduate students who email me nearly every week, asking to interview me for a dissertation. Often I will take the interview and it is really interesting when I ask them how many other people are interested in digital art, on AI, and on blockchains. And a lot of people say, yes, there's a lot of people writing and studying electively on these subjects as part of their dissertations. Which is one of the things that makes me feel like this is a generational thing. It's like, I do think this is what the kids are studying. I can feel it anecdotally.

‍LJ: Do the signs of new activity from the big art fairs, notably the announcement of Zero 10 at Art Basel Miami Beach dedicated to art of the digital age, and curated by Eli Scheinman, reflect the arrival of a new generation of digital art collectors?

‍RA: I think there will be trickle through, for sure. I could be wrong, but I do think the majority of collectors are still crypto native collectors. I don’t think there have been that many people that have crossed the chasm from the traditional art collecting world. There may be a few, but I still think we live in quite a siloed world, which is fine.

I think there’s always been the perspective that the amount of crypto wealth that has been generated will bring a new class of collector to global prominence. And we saw that in the first boom for NFTs in 2021-22. I think the market for NFTs is probably largely self-sufficient within the crypto ecosystem. Maybe these collaborations with institutions will change this, I wish Eli luck with it. 

‍LJ: Is there another art historical book that you would like to work on? Given the time?

‍RA: Right now, I need to make more art, and do less writing. But at some point I’d like to write one on the cultural history of bitcoin as well as a history of meme culture.