The new collector economy
If the NFT market was once driven by hype, today it integrates traditional art market tactics including pre-selling and the placing of artworks in prominent collections. With platforms increasingly operating across multiple blockchains and allowing credit card transactions, there is now less preventing traditional collectors from buying NFTs, even if they still require a crypto wallet to take custody of their works.
Today, the majority of digital art sales take place on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tezos. Because of its lower transaction costs, Tezos remains a natural starting point for collectors looking to explore the ecosystem on a budget. It was the grassroots appeal of the platform Hic Et Nunc that originally drew digital artists from all over the world to Tezos. Today, the core of that community has migrated to Teia, while the spirit of radical inclusivity continues on fx(hash), a generative art platform where many of the world’s leading creative coders have cut their teeth as contemporary artists. These include Iskra Velitchkova, Michaël Zancan, and Kitel, whose remarkable Fields of the Abandoned Homeland (2023) is an epic cycle of hope by an artist forced from his home in Kharkiv by Russian rocket bombardment.
For Zancan, ‘the real innovation and artistic value of generative art was the introduction of randomness and the fact that when you purchased an artwork, you didn’t know what you were going to buy.’ Increasingly, gen art also involves co-creation between artists and their collectors. For this reason, fx(hash) introduced fx(params) as a tool allowing collectors to play with the parameters of an algorithm on the basis that they might be more likely to buy a work if they have some agency over the final output.
