Five years after 2021: Where is digital art heading to?

I think that NFTs specifically experienced what the crypto space experienced in 2017, its first mainstream break.

I remember people mass-exiting during the 2018-2020 bear and many “normies” declaring crypto to be dead after the bubble had popped. But almost 10 years later crypto isn’t just here, it has grown multiple times in size, it attracted millions of new participants and it has become more legitimised through new laws, institutions and more.

I believe the same is happening and will happen to NFTs. The moment they prove that they weren’t a fad and “a firework” they will begin attracting a large amount of new participants and parties interested to build the rails in order to make NFTs more accessible to the average joe. The institutions never stopped caring but the main issue for NFTs is that liquidity dried up. But that is normal when the majority of people collecting NFTs depended on crypto to do well in order to collect. Things will turn around eventually and these collectors will become active again, with hopefully new entrants coming in as well. It was never a viable solution to not try and attract traditional art collectors or even normal people who weren’t collectors before, and just rely on crypto native collectors.

Digital Art has been a thing for dozes and dozens of years, NFTs were just a chapter in that story and that story is far from done.

Internet art IS public art, don’t forget that. It always has been. The most beautiful aspect of net art is that you can either own it or not, but it is out there for all to see. Also the work is at its most beautiful when viewed in it’s native environment, the internet.

I think you are right about the institutions.

I’m excited about this place, because for me the biggest advantage of the whole nft movement (selling art aside) was the ability to form meaningful connections with artists working with other mediums or curators / art enthusiasts from the different art worlds. And while I hate X, there needs to be some kind of platform.

Hi. Perhaps framing digital art as fleeting is the perspective to have.

What I mean by that is the mediums “value” lies in it's characteristic of instability within/across time at a pace that, to me, is closer to a human time that focues on instances and a constant present.

Than say an oil painting or a stone sculpture which seems to be about some sort of historical time that exists simultaneously in the future and the past.

I donno just speculation - but when i think about the work I make there are multiple elements that come together for a period of time. They do produce objects and drawings that exist in that future/past space which I see as documentation of the event but the present instance space of the digital is where the “art” exists.

Love

cogitechnaut