The Economic Criteria Of Crypto Art: An Artist & Collector’s Perspective

May 14, 2025

I decided on a dry title for this brief essay. But every word is important. One — art on the blockchain, or NFTs, or crypto art is underpinned by specific economic criteria. Two — you’re getting the perspective of both an artist and a collector…

While the markets crashed in 2008, I was a recently graduated art student, hawking my work to galleries and collectors. I knew very little about finance at the time, but I saw the stark shift in sentiment, from the ostentatious London art world of ’07, to complete austerity. It planted a seed in my head that bloomed into a bipolar interest both art and money, and how financial events shape art history.

The deeper I’ve researched, the more I understand that all moments in art history emerge from financial conditions. Religion and ideology just aren’t enough to push humanity over the line to create; the great motivator has been money. Medici, royal patrons, the history of banking; I’m always curious what artists do during boom times and economic downturns. Part of the fun is that artists are typically financially illiterate, often willfully, so they have a tendency to experience exaggerated moves in the business cycle.

I could write books on this subject, but maybe Wall Street said it better than I ever could: “It’s all about bucks kid, the rest is conversation.” The line comes from a monologue in the 1987 film, in which Gordon Gekko perfectly sums up the nature of art and money, free markets, marketing, and crowd psychology:

“This painting here, I bought it 10 years ago for $60,000, I could sell it today for $600,000. The illusion has become real. And the more real it becomes, the more desperate they want it. Capitalism at its finest.”

So what a gift I found in crypto art: an art world that sits on the rails of a new financial system; an art community whose infrastructure is built from a new payments technology — cryptocurrency. Not only that, but an art world that has grown from a specific convergence of economic criteria…

1) Boomer/Gen Z Economic Differential: Speculation
Over recent years, as Gen Z comes of age and acquires the maturity to see its own generation in a historical context, there has been a realization of ‘how easy Baby Boomers had it’, vs the economic pressures of living today. Queue endless memes of ‘my parents at 30 vs me at 30’. It would be easy to think of the childless late Millennial, either living with parents, or in a cramped apartment, isolated with a dead-end job, with little future prospects as just a meme. It is, in fact, a reality that contrasts with the world that Boomers inherited: high trust societies, double-digit bond yields, the opportunity to buy stock in companies with a P/E of 7 that would go on to ride the wave of 20th and 21st century innovation, and inexpensive real estate.

I could fill up this article with charts, but I simply recommend a visit to WTFHappenedIn1971.com to add color to this point.

This is why Millennials and Gen Z turn to speculation, and cryptocurrency is THE primary speculative asset. And THE speculative asset of speculative assets is crypto art. Nothing else has the volatility required to potentially turn a small pile into a bigger pile, which would enable the Millennial/Zoomer to at least get on top of inflation, the cost of living, negative interest rates, leaving enough freedom to perhaps one day take a plane and dodge the WW3 draft.

2) Pandemia: Money Supply & Isolation
Human beings have a short term memory problem. Weren’t we meant to be living in bubbles in 2025, with vaccine certificates to guarantee entry into public spaces? Greeting family and friends behind sheets of plastic? I thought the future was isolation, with nothing but a laptop, immaculate white desk space, occasionally going out to wave at our masked neighbors from a very safe distance? I at least trust you all have your family photos, all wearing your favorite face shields. So you mean to tell me I bought the full body bubble for nothing?

If you put a human being in a box with a gambling machine, and free money, what do you think will happen? The 2020 government and central bank pandemic response was an unprecedented increase in money supply, and free money handed out to a population that was house-bound. The result was the elevation in all assets, and small-time speculation in all forms of digital tokens. If you came out of the pandemic racing lambos backwards at 4am on a deserted road on the edge of Dubai all because of NFTs — good for you. You played the central bank-imposed lottery well.

I feel that if you buy into Crypto Art, you are buying into a future of social isolation that is reminiscent of our brief date with pandemia. Crypto Art is a digital experience — it was born of the digital, it came to mainstream prominence during a period in which people discounted Real Life and felt coerced into a screen-based, remote lifestyle. It’s a lifestyle that isn’t realistic for long-term survival, because it relies on outsourcing too many tenuous processes: food growing and delivery, trash collection and remediation, internet connection. It’s also a lifestyle that discounts social interaction, and all the important data that comes with socializing that builds our ability to feel empathy and ultimately grow.

3) Trust Lost
As I write, Coinbase has just been accepted in the S&P 500. It may seem obvious, but crypto art would be nothing without crypto. And crypto is a specific answer to a specific question: how to counter the moral hazard of the central bank monopoly on the supply on money? Cryptocurrency was the digital deflationary retort to inflationary fiat money.

Whilst the popularity of cryptocurrency has been perpetuated by the other 2 ripe economic conditions, the essential promise of cryptocurrency cannot be realized unless it is adopted by more than a few nerds. And whilst these nerds may have large buying power, for crypto to realize its potential as a full alternative or even evolution of the previous financial system, it has to be ingratiated into the existing system, and it is slowly doing so.

The story is still being written here, but the movement has been undeniably towards integration by innovators who accept Bitcoin’s (and others) unavoidable value proposition as an deflationary payments system that solves the double-spend problem.

Of course, cryptocurrency is also the ultimate surveillance tool and more than satisfies the original Biblical ‘mark of the beast’ prophesy: it is a public ledger that realistically can only be accessed via the fiat money system. Obviously you can still buy crypto for cash, shielding your identity, but how many crypto holders actually do so? Nope, the system has your stupid face, big nose and racoon eyes, holding your passport into the laptop camera in exchange for the opportunity to play in the sandbox.

The story is still being written as the pendulum swings between centralized control and individual freedom. Cryptocurrency’s promise is a decentralized money system. But centralized power doesn’t go quietly in the night. We will have to see how this pays out, but it is underpinned by a simple economic movement: the lost trust in governments and central banks. This lost trust shows up everywhere, from the price of gold, bonds and stocks. In other words, smart money moved to private assets like stocks and gold and out of public assets (bonds), because there is less trust in the governments’ ability to pay their debts and keep their promises. Cryptocurrency is classed as a private asset because it is not issued by a government or central bank. How well this privacy function works in practice is still yet to be seen. When an exchange freezes your transaction until you satisfy their AI-controlled KYC hoop-jumping, or your crypto purchase requires Visa or Mastercard, you are surely not in a new era of private bartering; you are just playing the sandbox of the existing financial system. Nonetheless, the undeniable movement of crypto is evidence of lost trust.

These are the 3 socio-economic criteria that propel the art of the blockchain: 1) generational speculation, 2) money supply, and 3) the move from public to private assets. I see these trends continuing past this decade, so why haven’t I personally jumped in to ride the wave?

Why I Don’t Collect Crypto Art

I am a lifelong collector of coins and banknotes. The history of the world is the history of money, and coins and banknotes can be small works of art in the themselves, being brilliantly executed by some of the most talented artisans in history.

I have not yet started to collect art, but I would like to in this lifetime. My vision is to collect smaller works of art. My collection would be just 20–30 items of old masters and small 2D works from important 20th century artists: a Da Vinci silverpoint, a drawing by Ingres or Picasso. I’m very interested in Eastern Europe figurative painting from the early 20th century, Neoclassicism, Baroque. My perfect collection has high, unwavering value, is easy to inventory, and portable.

My vision is motivated by the same principle that I have when collecting coins and banknotes: I am taking something of historical significance off the market, and protecting heritage. This is the ultimate hodl. This is what art collecting, in my opinion, is all about: heritage, legacy, conservation.

My other principle is that I must own art by artists I actually admire. I believe this is because I’m also an artist with my own specific technical ambitions. If I see an artist that has exceeded those ambitions, they are instantly relevant to me.

If I were to classify my dream collection in financial terms, it would be Blue Chip defensive. I would aim to own the Dow Jones of art: it transcends all speculation. If you buy the Dow Jones, you’re essentially buying into the past myth and future earnings of an entire country; you are buying into the greatness of American industriousness and mercantilism. If a single stock craters 90%, it is a mere rug-pull. If the DJIA plummets 90%, it would be the death of the idea of America.

So why not crypto art? Because I differ from Gordon Gekko, in that as invested in the free markets as I am, I have a separate mandate as an artist. I have access to the world’s speculative assets via an Interactive Brokers account — that’s a big enough of an opportunity set to satisfy speculative activity. So my artist and collector mandate is free to exist separately, outside of the bounds of money-making. The principle is based on simple wisdom, that great art is eternal and transcends speculation. And that mandates me to collect artworks whose value is unquestioned. There’s a whole new level of self respect that comes from not having to go into the trenches in the hopes of digging up a lottery ticket in the form of a Crypto Punk, Squiggly Doodle or Pudgy Squiggle. And then there would be the backwards rationalizing, pretending to like these crude pixelated images because of the ‘art’. If the value suddenly craters and these digital tokens turn out to be not so hot… won’t I feel a bit silly? Won’t I feel a bit stupid, to die justifying my decision to buy digital fluff because I thought that it would be a hotter potato for the greater fool?

As an artist, the wool cannot be pulled over my eyes. I find the charade laughable. Of the ‘Blue Chip NFTs’, their value is still too speculative, there is no heritage worth preserving, there are very few that I admire technically. Monuments to human potential are thin on the ground, and I struggle to find anything that fits my definitions of beauty. I’m eager to start my art collection. In the meantime, I continue financial speculation, and I make art.