‘It’s chaos for a lot of people’: what is the future of NFTs in Australian art?

While many players in more traditional fine art circles feel ill-equipped to deal with the digital art trend, some contemporary art enthusiasts are going all in

In 1962, the French neo-avant-garde artist Yves Klein began dealing in what he declared to be Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility. In exchange for a sum of solid gold, Klein would imbue a patch of thin air with his artistic aura and provide a receipt. One such zone" was bequeathed to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where it exists only as a photograph of the transaction, taken as the receipt was set ablaze and half the gold tossed into the Seine. In postwar Europe, such high-minded (Klein was an amphetamine addict, as well as a provocateur) artistic experiments both raised eyebrows and opened wallets.

Sixty years later, the mind-bending US$69m sale of another intangible artwork, Everydays: the First 5,000 Days by digital artist Beeple, in the form of an NFT (non-fungible token) at Christie's in March this year likewise has the art world paying attention.