Traditional Art Market Ages, NFTs Emerge as the New Medici Moment

Original author: vangoya, NFT analyst

Felix, PANews

Most people in the crypto space believe NFTs are outdated.

In the art world, most people believe NFTs were a scam that briefly fooled a few Hollywood celebrities and crypto founders in Singapore before fading away.

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

• It’s just a JPEG image.
• I can right-click to save your million-dollar monkey.
• NFTs are a scam — they’re just pushing random animal images at inflated prices.

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

But all these claims are wrong, and the data clearly shows this—I truly don’t understand why no one has publicly pointed this out.

In 2025, the traditional art market generated $59.6 billion in sales, a 4% increase from the previous year, but still below the peak of $67.8 billion in 2022.

The current NFT market size is approximately $2 billion, down about 90% from its peak. On the surface, you might say: "Yeah, NFTs lost."

But you can't just look at the surface. Over the past four years, the entire art world—including museums, top galleries, auction houses, and the most seasoned collectors—has been quietly building infrastructure for what they claim is already dead.

This is not a “buy signal” essay telling you that the floor price of your favorite PFP (profile picture NFT) is about to surge 50x. Instead, this article will take you on a deep dive into:

• While everyone was watching price movements, what were the gatekeepers of the art world doing?
• Why has every major art movement been ridiculed for decades before being recognized?
• Why the bearish view on NFTs is fundamentally unfounded.

The traditional art market is valued at $59.6 billion. This figure is from a 2026 report by Art Basel and UBS, authored by Dr. Clare McAndrew, one of the most respected analysts in the field over the past decade.

In NFT standards, this number is enormous. But there are some truths about this number that no one has told you:

• Growth has stalled: down from the 2022 peak of $67.8 billion, with two consecutive years of decline before a slight rebound.
• The mid-market has shrunk: the market for works under $50,000 has been declining for over a decade.
• High concentration of value: Works priced above $1 million accounted for less than 1% of the total lots but represented 54% of the total value.
• Wealth transfer: The report also highlights an upcoming critical turning point: the “massive wealth transfer.” Over the next two decades, more than $80 trillion in assets will be passed from the baby boomer generation to their descendants.

Read again the phrase: "1% of lots account for 54% of value." The traditional art market is not truly a $60 billion market. It is a $30 billion market accessible to the general public, plus a $30 billion "super casino" at the top, where billionaires trade works by Basquiat and Picasso as an efficient tax avoidance strategy.

But this top-tier market faces a problem: the buyers are aging, the dealers are aging, and the infrastructure is aging. The generation inheriting $80 trillion did not grow up flipping through Sotheby’s catalogues.

They grew up in the internet age.

Therefore, before discussing NFTs, let’s be clear: the so-called competitors of NFTs are not a thriving, expanding market. They are a mature market with serious centralization issues, undergoing a generational transition, and the next generation does not want those old assets. And this, precisely, is what people refer to as “safe assets.”

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

Now let’s see how those in charge of art actually use their own money.

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

• A small number of artists have created a new form of work.
• Critics mock, collectors ignore.
• A few courageous curators have included these works in institutional collections.
• Other museums also followed suit upon seeing the acquisition activities.
• The auction house noticed the shift among institutions and began auctioning such works.
• Top galleries have signed these artists.
• The price continues to rise over the coming generations.

This is a common tactic that works for photography, video art, and installation art—it works for every medium that the art world initially did not consider “real art.”

This same scheme is currently playing out in the digital art and on-chain art spaces. Most people are unaware that the early stages have already been quietly completed.

Some of the works permanently collected by major museums:

• The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York: In 2023, it acquired Refik Anadol’s work “Unsupervised,” which was displayed in the museum’s lobby for nearly a year and attracted 3 million visitors. The acquisition also included a companion NFT and a blockchain-based collectible that visitors could mint. That same year, MoMA also acquired Ian Cheng’s “3FACE,” a generative NFT that reads the contents of its owner’s wallet and evolves as the wallet’s contents change. This conceptual artwork could not exist without blockchain.
• Centre Pompidou (Paris): In 2023, it acquired 18 NFT works from 13 artists, including pieces by CryptoPunk, Autoglyph, and Sarah Meyohas. Curator Marcella Lista described it as a natural extension of the museum’s collection of masters such as Bruce Nauman.
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA): Home to one of the world’s most prestigious on-chain art collections. In February 2023, collector Cozomo de’ Medici donated 22 generative and blockchain-based artworks, including CryptoPunks, Dmitri Cherniak’s Ringer, and works by Tyler Hobbs. This marked the largest blockchain art donation ever received by a U.S. museum. Additionally, Art Blocks founder Erick Calderon directly donated the final version of Chromie Squiggle, the seminal work that launched the entire on-chain generative art movement. LACMA has also established the first museum fund in the U.S. dedicated exclusively to digital art by women artists.
• The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami): It was one of the first institutions to accept the donation of CryptoPunk #5293. In 2022, Yuga Labs donated a second Punk and launched the "Punks Legacy Program," aimed at bringing CryptoPunks to museums around the world.
• The Whitney: For years, it has quietly collected digital and net art, including two works by Rafaël Rozendaal in its permanent collection. Since 2001, it has operated a digital exhibition platform called Artport.
• Buffalo AKG Art Museum: In late 2022, it hosted the "Peer to Peer" exhibition, the first blockchain art exhibition held by a U.S. museum. The curator highlighted a significant historical parallel: in 1910, the same museum hosted the first photography exhibition by a U.S. museum. At that time, photography was still not considered art, even though three-quarters of a century had passed since its invention.
• Guggenheim Museum: In 2024, it exhibited Jenny Holzer's "Light Line," a 900-foot-long rolling LED installation featuring AI-generated text.

The Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (ICA Miami), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum together form the institutional backbone of contemporary art in the United States and Europe, all of which have formally committed to supporting digital and blockchain art over the past four years.

Those who aren’t paying attention will tell you that institutions don’t care. But in fact, these institutions have already entered the market publicly. The market is ignoring it only because the floor price has dropped.

This is a part often overlooked by crypto enthusiasts but widely understood by those in the art world.

In 1863, the official French exhibition, the Paris Salon, rejected over 2,000 paintings. Due to the large number of rejections and the resulting public outcry, Napoleon III ordered the creation of the Salon des Refusés. People flocked to see it, but mostly to mock it. Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” was the centerpiece, and critics called it vulgar.

Today, this painting is regarded as one of the foundational works of modern art and is housed in the Musée d'Orsay. If it were ever sold, its value would be incalculable.

In 1874, a group of artists excluded by the official salon held their own exhibition. A critic mocked them by referencing Monet’s painting “Impression, Sunrise,” and used the term “Impressionists” as an insult.

The name spread widely from then on. Later, it became the most important genre in history.

It wasn’t until 1987, more than a century after the rejected salon, that one of Van Gogh’s paintings broke the auction record for modern art, surpassing prices long dominated by Old Masters. “Sunflowers” sold at Christie’s for nearly $40 million.

Van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime. Today, his works routinely fetch over $100 million at auction.

This lag is an inevitable part of every artistic revolution, without exception.

This does not mean that artistic recognition always takes a century. Rather, satire often comes first, followed by institutional acceptance, and finally market repricing.

Take Pop Art as an example. In July 1962, Andy Warhol’s series “Campbell’s Soup Cans” opened at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Across the street, another gallery publicly mocked it by displaying actual Campbell’s Soup cans in its window with a sign reading “Real ones, 29 cents.” Only five of the 32 paintings sold. The gallery owner, Irving Blum, eventually bought the entire set back for $1,000.

These 32 soup can paintings are now among the most valuable pieces in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. One painting from the series was privately sold for over $9 million.

That grocery store has long been forgotten.

Take conceptual art as an example. In 1967, Sol LeWitt published "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" in Artforum magazine. The opening line reads: "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art." At the time, the art world largely regarded this as a marginal philosophy. Early conceptual artists deliberately created works in the form of protocols, instructions, and certificates that could not be collected, partly to critique the gallery system. They sought to escape the market.

Sol LeWitt's auction record has now exceeded $1.6 million. His wall drawings are now held in major museums around the world.

Conceptually, a mural is like a smart contract: someone writes the rules, and someone else executes them. The "art" exists within the protocol.

He invented the framework for on-chain generative art, decades before blockchains existed that could run such a framework—fifty years before the emergence of blockchain technology.

Now, let’s see how long it took for these artworks to be created. The following section should surprise you:

• Impressionism: Took 124 years, from being ridiculed in 1863 to breaking the modern art auction record for the first time in 1987.
• Pop art: After being mocked in a grocery store in 1962, it was permanently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York by the late 1960s, eventually selling for millions of dollars.
• Conceptual art: It took approximately 35 years from the 1967 manifesto to auction prices surpassing a million.
• NFT art: Quantum, which most people consider the first NFT, was minted in 2014. CryptoPunks were launched in 2017. Christie’s held its first major NFT art auction in 2021. Seven years later.

Seven years.

The Impressionists held eight exhibitions before the world even knew how to refer to them. The first NFT artists are still creating today. Most of them are still alive. Most of them are still in the middle of their careers. The same pricing strategy once applied to Manet, Van Gogh, Warhol, and Lévy is now quietly unfolding for them.

It took Impressionism decades to go from being ridiculed to achieving a valuation of billions of dollars. Conceptual art faced the same resistance.

The pattern is: a new medium emerges, mainstream society dismisses it, then a large number of creators and collectors begin to embrace it, followed by institutions, and finally capital flows in.

The pace of NFT development has been faster than any art movement in history.

“Ideas become machines that make art.” — Sol LeWitt, 1967

He was talking about murals at the time, but his description could just as easily apply to smart contracts.

Four: Top galleries have already voted with their feet

If you want to know which artists will be remembered 20 years from now, don’t look at auction prices—look at which galleries have signed them. Galleries like Pace, Gagosian, and Hauser & Wirth control who enters museums and who makes it into textbooks. They are the most conservative players in the art world, and only sign artists they believe will still matter 50 years from now.

Pace Gallery: Founded in 1960, it represents the estates of artists such as Rothko and Sol LeWitt. Sol LeWitt is the artist most closely associated with the conceptual legacy of NFT art. In November 2021, Pace launched Pace Verso, a dedicated NFT and Web3 platform. Since then, they have collaborated with many of their prominent artists to release a series of NFT projects:

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

Take a close look at this list. These artists are not newcomers to the crypto space—they are established figures in the contemporary art world, releasing NFT works for the first time through one of the top three galleries.

Then, in March 2023, Pace did something even more significant: they hosted a solo exhibition for Tyler Hobbs, a generative artist who rose to prominence in the on-chain art space, at their flagship gallery in New York. Twelve large-scale paintings generated by his QQL algorithm were displayed alongside works by Rothko and Calder.

The QQL Mint Pass was sold for $17 million in September of the previous year. A month later, during the crypto bear market, its secondary market price surged to $28 million.

Pace Gallery's solo exhibition for a generative NFT artist is not a stunt, but a vote.

This is not an isolated case:

• Lehmann Maupin Gallery became the first commercial gallery to accept cryptocurrency payments.
• Hauser & Wirth gallery is exhibiting Jenny Holzer’s NFT-related works.
• Gagosian Gallery accepts cryptocurrency payments.
• Sotheby's launched its dedicated metaverse marketplace in 2021, and since its launch, NFT sales have exceeded $100 million, while continuing to pay royalties to artists even as most markets have abandoned on-chain royalty payments.
• Sotheby's launched Sotheby's 3.0 in October 2022, the first fully blockchain-based auction platform introduced by a traditional auction house.

Auction houses and top galleries don’t have to do this— their businesses are already thriving without cryptocurrency. They’re doing it because the most conservative corners of the art world have analyzed the data and concluded that the collecting trends of the next 25 years will emerge here.

Mike Winkelmann created a digital painting every day for thirteen consecutive years and posted them online, but almost no one paid attention. He had only a small group of fans, no gallery representation, and no interest from museums—he had no foothold in the traditional art world.

However, in March 2021, Christie's auctioned a file composed of all 5,000 of his works, which sold for $69.3 million. His online name is Beeple.

Now, 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 time a major auction house offered a purely digital NFT artwork. Beeple thus became the third-highest-valued living artist in auction history.
• Pak, "The Merge": Sold for a record $91.8 million in 2021, the highest auction price for a work by a living artist, though this comparison remains controversial due to the piece being sold in multiple units.
• Beeple, "HUMAN ONE": Sold for $29 million at Christie's in November 2021. This is a hybrid sculpture combining physical and digital elements, featuring a dynamic NFT component.
• Dmitri Cherniak, Ringers #879: Sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s in June 2023 during a bear market—the second-highest price ever achieved for a generative artwork at auction. The total proceeds from Sotheby’s GRAILS auction that day reached approximately $11 million, setting eight new artist auction records. This was not the hype of 2021, but a demonstration of unwavering belief during the 2023 crypto winter.
• Tyler Hobbs, Fidenza #725: Sold for over $1 million at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction in May 2023, five times its high estimate.
• XCOPY, the "Right-click and Save As Guy": Sold for approximately $7 million at a SuperRare auction in late 2021. Several of his works have sold for millions of dollars.
• Refik Anadol, in addition to having his work collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, became the first artist to project onto the exterior of the Las Vegas Sphere in September 2023, where he resided for four months. Prior to this, his works have been exhibited at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Casa Batlló, and the Venice Architecture Biennale. He became Google’s first resident artist in 2016.

These are not isolated cases, but part of a whole.

Today, a significant number of digital artists are active in the art world, with auction prices reaching seven- and even eight-figure sums, their works collected by museums across three continents, and prominent placements in the world’s leading contemporary art galleries.

Five years ago, this group did not exist.

The hype has passed, but the infrastructure remains solid. And those building the infrastructure won’t wait for you to realize it.

If you want to understand the future market direction of an asset class, look for those who continuously accumulate assets during bear markets.

A collector calling themselves "Cozomo de' Medici" has gained widespread attention—not by accident.

The original Medici family once funded Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Donatello, when these artists were not yet well known and painting as an art form was just emerging. If calculated over time, the returns on these investments were nearly infinite.

While others didn’t understand, the Medici family recognized that the medium was changing, and those who realized this first would shape the classics.

In February 2023, Cozomo de' Medici donated 22 generative art pieces to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The name Medici speaks for itself. They bet that net art would be remembered by future generations as the Florentine Renaissance is.

They are not alone:

• Punk6529: This anonymous collector purchased "The Goose" for $6.2 million. He operates a museum district in the metaverse featuring over two thousand works. At its peak, his personal collection was valued at over $20 million. For years, he has publicly written that NFTs are not merely commodities, but a new system for owning digital culture.
• Flamingo DAO: A group of approximately one hundred members that began raising funds in October 2020. They own the only complete set of CryptoPunks attributes in existence, along with a full set of Autoglyphs. They hold one Alien Punk, an NFT purchased in 2021 for approximately $7.5 million, now valued at around $13 million. Their portfolio once reached a peak valuation of $1 billion.
• PleasrDAO: Purchased the only existing copy of the Wu-Tang Clan album from the U.S. federal government, which had previously been seized from Martin Shkreli. They also acquired Edward Snowden’s Stay Free NFT for over $5 million. Additionally, they bought the original Doge meme NFT and split it into pieces for sale. PleasrDAO has received support from a16z.

These individuals are not retail speculators or ordinary buyers. They are collectors and groups with sufficient capital, conviction, and cultural literacy who continue to invest even after the NFT hype subsides, viewing NFT collections as an investable asset class.

Add to that anonymous institutional collectors, family offices quietly buying in, and the fact that Christie’s on-chain bidding is now sufficient to support its dedicated platform, and you’ll find the reality doesn’t match the public narrative that “NFTs are dead.”

NFTs are being accumulated. It's just that their holders aren't posting their portfolios on X every day.

The example of the Medici family is precisely the essence of the entire transaction:

Identify the mediums that institutions will want to collect before they realize it, and acquire foundational works at relatively low prices—well below their future value.

This is what the original Medici family did.

If you've read this far, you already know what I'm going to say.

The traditional art market is shrinking, consolidating, and aging. Its primary buyers are older individuals, and its infrastructure was built for a generation that did not grow up in the digital age. The next generation—those who came of age online—are set to inherit $80 trillion in wealth.

Some of the most important contemporary art institutions in the United States and Europe have officially committed to investing in digital and on-chain art.

For the past 150 years, every major art movement has been mocked for decades before being taken seriously. NFT art, by contrast, has only existed for 7 to 12 years.

Top galleries have made their choices. Pace Gallery has hosted a solo exhibition for Tyler Hobbs. Sotheby’s operates a dedicated digital art platform. Christie’s operates a fully web-based auction platform.

The auction prices are already set. Beeple sold for $69 million. Pak is worth $91 million. Cherniak is valued at $6.2 million during a bear market. Anadol’s work appears on the Las Vegas Sphere.

Collectors are heavily accumulating, including Flamingo, PleasrDAO, 6529, Cozomo, and lesser-known family offices.

Here are the most common misconceptions about NFTs.

They think NFTs are a type of trade category. They are not. NFTs are a system of ownership. Before NFTs, digital culture had infinite channels for distribution, but zero ownership. Everything was being shared, nothing could be truly held, and all value flowed to platforms rather than to creators or collectors of the works.

NFTs have overturned all of this. Culture can now be infinitely distributed while still being finite in ownership.

This is the key point. The price of art has always depended on three factors: provenance, story, and cultural relevance, and on-chain ownership cannot replace any of them—it enhances all three.

Blockchain-based, socially consensus-driven scarce artworks are a new form of scarcity, and those collecting these artworks today are doing exactly what every generation of authoritative collectors has done at the dawn of every ultimately significant artistic medium.

What truly makes the entire argument valid is the following point:

On-chain art is the first major art category whose ownership history can be programmatic, public, and timestamped from its inception.

It doesn't solve all problems: copyright, storage, authorship, and cultural value remain crucial. But it addresses provenance more effectively than the traditional art market.

The traditional art market loses billions of dollars annually due to forgeries, lost provenance, and attribution disputes. The Knoedler Gallery, America’s oldest gallery with a 165-year history, sold $80 million in forgeries—including fake Rothkos and Pollocks—before closing in 2011. Even the Salvator Mundi, sold at Christie’s for $450 million, is officially labeled as “by Leonardo da Vinci,” though this remains contested.

On-chain art does not have this issue. The provenance of the work is the medium itself. Every previous owner is verifiable. Every transaction has a timestamp. Every smart contract is auditable.

For the first time in history, a piece of art and its complete ownership history are immutable mathematical objects.

You can right-click to save a JPEG image, but you cannot right-click to save the source information of the work. That’s the key point.

This is the ultimate realization of Sol LeWitt’s concept of “dematerialization,” introduced in 1967.

The concept is the machine. The machine creates art. The blockchain records everything.

If you truly analyze the data on museum collections, auction records, gallery representation, collector demographics, historical timelines, inheritance patterns, structural issues in traditional markets, and the advantages of on-chain provenance and ownership systems, you’ll realize that the market capitalization of NFT art cannot remain at $2 billion forever.

$2 billion is the current market capitalization of an asset class:

• The world's most prestigious museums are acquiring their foundational works;
• The world's most conservative gallery is signing its artists;
• The world's most professional collectors are quietly accumulating;
• The most transparent tracing system ever;
• Trillions of dollars in inheritance are set to pass into the hands of buyers who grew up with screens, and this generational tailwind will generate tremendous returns.

The stake is not in the price, but in the medium itself.

And this medium has won the only key debate: the institutions that decide what counts as "art" have already made their decision.

The truly valuable aspects of NFT art survived the speculative crash and institutionalized faster than most controversial art movements in history.

Pessimistic arguments suggest that NFTs are dying because the speculative market collapsed. But institutional records show that speculation has faded, while the medium itself has endured.

This does not mean that all PFPs will make a comeback—most won’t; nor does it imply that every collection from 2021 is essential. Rather, it means that the foundational works of on-chain art are being actively curated, collected, interpreted, and recognized as classics in real time.

The key is not that "NFTs have returned."

The key point is that digital art is entering art history, while most people still treat it like a passing fad.

In 1965, you could buy an Andy Warhol piece for the price of a used car. Today, the same artwork sells for nine figures. Now, the price of foundational digital art is exactly where Warhol’s works were in 1965. This isn’t speculation—it’s verifiable data.

Salon mocked Manet. The grocery store mocked Warhol. Today, those who mock Beeple, Anadol, Hobbs, and Cherniak sound very similar to those who mocked every new medium before it was ultimately accepted as art.

History always proves who ends up looking foolish in such a game. The only question now is whether you’ll act before those who haven’t read this article.