NFTs stripped art of pretense, leaving pure commodification without symbolic experimentation.

Evidence

The rise of NFTs was a stark departure from traditional notions of artistic value. Journalist Rebecca Alter dismissed projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club as having “all the aesthetic complexity of a pissing Calvin bumper sticker.” Beeple claimed, like avant-garde artists before him, “I’m just trying to expand people’s idea of what art is,” but in his case, he was fighting for the dignity of mediocre, tasteless art. Contemporary art had long been tied to speculation and status marking, but NFTs stripped away even the pretense of intellectual or symbolic experimentation, reducing the entire exercise to mere commodification. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 730

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with Marx’s own earlier framing of art’s avant-garde lineage; the Beeple ‘expanding art’ parallel to historical avant-gardes is bait for the counter-argument that the era isn’t blank but satirical-flattened.