The rise and fall (and future) of digital art

On 11 March 2021, a mysterious buyer who went by the pseudonym Metakovan made history with the purchase of a digital artwork, by the American artist Beeple, for $69.3 million. Many regarded the sale – which took place at the esteemed Christie’s auction house – as the high point in a craze for digital art in the first years of the 2020s, spurred on by the mainstreaming of NFTs, plus Covid lockdowns and a culture of reckless speculation. However, the highs of the digital art market in 2021 only magnified the lows of the crash that followed. And the lows were low. Many collectors lost thousands, or even millions, as prices plummeted in 2022. Trades dried up. And by 2023, two years after the Beeple sale, it was reported that 95 per cent of NFT collectors were now holding “worthless” investments. 

Can we really measure the value of art by sales figures and market activity, though? Should we write off a whole new artistic medium because of one failed experiment – even if that one experiment was valued at some $617 billion at its peak? Digital art’s pioneers, and their most loyal supporters, aren’t so sure. Take, for example, Vignesh Sundaresan, the technologist and art collector who revealed himself as the man behind the infamous Metakovan moniker. As far as he’s concerned, the NFT bubble (and the damage it caused when it burst) was part of a natural boom and bust cycle that almost any new technology has to go through. “There is euphoria, then depression,” he says. “Personally, I think the market crash is fine.”

Those who lost their life savings when the value of their cartoon animal jpegs sunk to zero might find fault with Sundaresan’s blasé outlook. Then again, it would take a very naïve collector to plunge their funds into an emerging market like NFTs without understanding the risks. “The idea that somehow a whole new art movement was going to be created, and it wasn’t going to be volatile... of course it is,” says Robert Alice, artist and author of 2025’s On NFTs. “We’re still trying to figure this out, in real time. We’re experimenting, and failing, in public, and I think there’s something nice about that.” Even Beeple himself warned about the risky nature of the market when the frenzy was at its highest in 2021, telling the New York Times: “This stuff will absolutely go to zero.”

We’re still trying to figure this out, in real time. We’re experimenting, and failing, in public

On NFTs, a 700-page tome published by Taschen, is a deep and illuminating survey of the technology from its infancy to the current day, going far beyond viral profile picture (PFP) projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club or art world stunts like Damien Hirst’s The Currency. But Alice’s impact on the digital art world goes much further back, to 2020, when he became the first artist to sell an NFT at a major auction house. It’s fair to say that this helped set the precedent for Sundaresan’s purchase of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days a few months later, which Alice frames as a pivotal – and often misconstrued – moment in the history of digital art. “For $69 million, Metakovan basically established NFTs on the global stage,” he says. Here, it should be noted that Sundaresan has collected at least one work by Alice. And many art critics do tell a different story, arguing that Sundaresan should have paid more attention to the actual content of the artwork, or that the sale was simply a ruse to pump up his investments in several other Beeple works (tokenised via his crypto fund Metapurse, in which Beeple also reportedly held a two per cent stake).

Sundaresan says he appreciates the scepticism of the digital art world, and he doesn’t appear to be in a hurry to dispel the accusations. In fact, he’s still coming to terms with his own reasons for buying Everydays, he tells Dazed in a back room at Padimai, his newly-formed art and tech studio in Singapore. “I didn’t understand art,” he admits, but through his familiarity with blockchain technologies he sensed that the Christie’s sale marked an important moment – something in which it was worth forking out an eye-watering sum of money just to be involved, if you take Sundaresan at his word. What he’s done with the artwork since the sale has also been a case of trial-and-error: first, he encouraged anyone to download the image file to enjoy (or not) in the comfort of their own desktop, then he experimented with a virtual exhibition space in the metaverse.

Notably, Sundaresan wasn’t interested in hoarding Everydays for himself, as was often the case with buyers of NFTs like Bored Apes or Cryptopunks. Incidentally, Alice calls the latter “some of the most important portraits of the 21st century” (for better or for worse). “The PFP model has radically reengineered our concept of portraiture in art,” he suggests. Sundaresan seems less convinced, saying: “I never involved myself with PFPs, as they were called. Even back then, it didn’t interest me at all.” Instead, he was focused on how blockchain technologies – the digital infrastructure that NFTs are built upon – could be used as tools for a new kind of artistic patronage, or to build an archive that could contain the history of digital art. In the end, he says, the hype around Everydays became too much, and he decided to take a pause. “It became too big.” It was also around this time that Sundaresan connected with the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson.

At first glance, Sundaresan and Eliasson might seem like a strange pairing. One is seen to represent an art movement whose primary aim was (and still is) to reformulate the dynamics of the art world and do away with its traditional gatekeepers. The other is about as ‘established’ as it’s possible to get, with his large-scale installation art gracing some of the world’s biggest galleries and public spaces. However, this contrast is part of the appeal, according to Sundaresan. “We would meet at a point of not being able to understand,” he explains – Eliasson was often mystified, by his own admission, by the emerging technologies of the digital art world, while Sundaresan was just beginning to explore the art world as it’s existed for the last few hundred years, including its ideas about ownership and the value of the public commons. He describes their subsequent conversations as a “journey into the unknown” that culminated in the commissioning of a new virtual reality artwork by Eliasson, Your view matter, in 2022.

I like paradox... it’s an interesting door into something very curious

In Your view matter (which also exists as an NFT, naturally) viewers navigate a series of overlaid geometric spaces whose walls shift and distort according to the angle they’re viewed through a VR headset. The concept is based on moiré patterns – the same thing that causes a TV screen to glitch and wobble when viewed through a smartphone lens – and these mean that the visuals change upon every visit, with each viewer’s experience proving impossible to repeat. Just like the patterns kicked up by the friction between a TV screen and a phone camera, Eliasson’s virtual environment also changes depending on the hardware used by the viewer: at Padimai, this takes the form of high-tech VR headsets that dangle from the roof, but it’s also accessible at home using any devices that you can get your hands on. 

“Initially, I understood Olafur as being interested in architecture, and I wanted him to build something in the metaverse,” says Sundaresan. So how did Your view matter end up being so dependent on physical space and hardware? Partly, the collector suggests, it’s about preserving the idea of art and gallery-going as a shared “social ritual” – Padimai also includes a space for screenings, talks, and discussions to help foster this collective approach to art. But it also stems from a wider sense of confusion about how digital art and NFTs are supposed to be experienced. “Digital art... you don’t know what to do with it,” Sudaresan says. “OK, do I print it out? I’ve seen it, now what?” This is where Eliasson came in. “He’s empathetic,” says Sundaresan. “He’s always thinking about the visitor, how you can bring that person into the space and into the artwork.” 

Still, doesn’t it seem like a paradox to present digital art in a physical, mediated space? Wasn’t the whole point of the NFT boom in the early 2020s to break down these kinds of barriers to viewing art? Sundaresan smiles. “I like paradox,” he says. Plus, the formula he’s testing out at Padimai is far from the only way to interact with NFTs and the wider sphere of digital art; it’s more of an experiment, he suggests, taking inspiration from the radical and relentless experimentation of the so-called cypherpunks who pioneered the private, decentralised internet that today’s crypto enthusiasts hope to wrestle back from Big Tech. Following the lead of this early crypto movement, Sundaresan is also investing in blockchain technologies to run alongside the physical exhibition space, as a way for artists to store and date their archives outside of the privatised digital spaces owned by corporations like Google, Meta, or Microsoft. 

When you start to understand blockchains more, you understand they’re ultimately not about price mechanisms. They’re basically clocks, timestamping thingss

Archiving is a core application of blockchains that often goes overlooked in favour of the headline-grabbing “price goes up, price goes down” narrative, suggests Alice. This might have something to do with the fact that the technology is complex and fairly impenetrable for outsiders, whereas money is relatable (we can all get outraged when tens of millions change hands for a pixellated zombie). But, says Alice, when you start to understand blockchains: “You understand they’re ultimately not about price mechanisms. They’re basically clocks, timestamping things.” In theory, this means that an artist who works in a digital medium can assemble a dated, verifiable archive of their works in real time. This doesn’t necessarily mean turning every work into an NFT, but that each work can be turned into a tradeable token if it proves worthwhile – like when a traditional curator finds a hidden gem in an artist’s archive – and, because it was already logged on the blockchain, it will retain all of the information about how and when it was created. 

If this process feels irrelevant in the wake of the NFT crash and “crypto winter” of 2022, Alice argues that you’ve got the framing of the technology all wrong. In fact, he doesn’t like the idea of calling it a “rise and fall” to begin with, pointing to the “huge, resilient community” of collectors, critics, curators, and artists who were working with blockchain-based art years before the multibillion-dollar hype of 2021, and who remain active today, four years after that hype has died down again. “Ironically, it’s everybody else that’s interested in these crazy prices, not the people who are actually in the space,” he says. And increasingly, that demographic collides with big, institutional art museums like the Pompidou, MoMA, LACMA, and the Whitney, which have all acquired blockchain-based artworks in recent years.

Alice doesn’t see folding NFTs into the traditional art world as a bad thing, necessarily. “One downside of having a very open, democratic cultural layer is [that] it can quickly feel chaotic,” he says, and there’s an argument to be made in favour of some system for curating or canonising all the work that’s shared via our new technological mediums. That is, the “cultural weighing mechanism” of the free market – whose main currencies are money and attention – is all good for deciding the favourite artworks of a given moment in time; it can even expand our sense of who gets to call themselves art lovers or collectors. But it might prove less useful when it comes to selecting generationally important or influential artworks, especially if their value doesn’t translate so easily to dollars, crypto, or clicks.

It’s a good time to ask: why do you want to make NFTs?

Going back to the Beeple sale, would giant, public-facing galleries be collecting blockchain-based works so enthusiastically if someone hadn’t paid $69 million for his NFT in 2021 (regardless of their motives)? Maybe not, and as a result there might be much less energy – positive or negative – around these conversations about a different way to make, archive, collect and curate art. “I think it created a continued, deep discourse,” Sundaresan says, with plenty of room for diverse opinions and disagreements. And if the hype and crash carved out this space, he adds, its aftermath offers a more stable arena for deciding what the future of the movement might look like, where people’s eyes are clouded by dollar signs. “It’s a good time to ask: why do you want to make NFTs?”

This doesn’t mean that today’s digital art world is without significant risks. While speculation is still rife across some parts of the internet, there’s also a very real concern that the solidification of the blockchain and other artistic tools only serves to establish a new hierarchy. How do we avoid the exploitation of artists, collectors, and art fans by those holding the reins to these new technologies, having learned the hard way that previous tech – like social media – wasn’t quite as emancipatory as it first seemed? “It’s a very important question,” says Sundaresan. For him, it all goes back to the philosophy of the cypherpunk movement, which resisted the desire to make the most its ‘first-mover advantage’, capitalise on a gold rush, and use its gains to dictate what the future should look like. Instead, he suggests, the digital art world needs to stay on the attack. “You have to be constantly rebellious.”

Your view matter by Olafur Eliasson is presented at Padimai Art & Tech Studio from November 20 to the end of March 2026. Entry is free.

On NFTs is published by TASCHEN.