I recall walking into the Mauritshuis in the Hague – a Dutch museum, tempered by old architecture and the distinct smell of wood varnish – and thinking this was the definition of art: expert strokes and aged turpentine, canvases that were centuries old. Existing in a space between the Rembrandts and one small, delicate goldfinch painting made it hard to define art as anything else. I felt like a magnificent loser in comparison. Two years from that moment, it’s 2020 and I’m on a train heading for Schiphol airport, amidst the strangest circumstances. Nestled between posts narrating the pandemic’s trajectory and country-wide lockdowns, there was another topic needling its way into my Twitter feed as I scrolled through during the train ride: NFTs. Otherwise known as non-fungible tokens, NFTs were being touted as a means that enabled artists to sell their digital artwork, regardless of what format it came in. Artist after artist flew across my congested Twitter feed, capitalizing on the craze with their own NFTs This was the start of a digital art renaissance I thought, and few people outside the social media realm were aware of it…
