Digital Art's History Ignored in NFT Hype

Valentina Tanni argues that the discourse around digital art repeatedly ignores decades of artistic and theoretical precedent. Despite computer art emerging over sixty years ago, each new technology—interactive installations in the 1980s, Net Art in the 1990s, AI algorithms, and now blockchain—triggers a fresh debate on materiality, reproducibility, and marketability as if these questions had never been addressed. The NFT craze, catalyzed by Beeple's $69 million sale at Christie's, exemplifies this amnesia. The conversation is dominated by economic and legal considerations, overlooking earlier digital art market innovations such as Postmasters Gallery selling works on floppy disks in 1996, Bitforms Gallery founded in 2001, and the left gallery accepting cryptocurrency since 2015. Tanni highlights a key positive development: a new generation of artists seeking recognition and sustenance outside the traditional system, driven by a desire for autonomy and disintermediation. The article includes a timeline of thirteen milestones in digital art, from Michael A. Noll's 1965 copyright for a computer-generated image to the founding of the left gallery in 2015.