Artwork, Market and Commodity Form

1. Introduction

The emergence of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has added a new dimension to the art market and changed the way digital art is created, bought, sold and owned. NFTs, a type of digital tokens (ERC-721 2018) enabled by smart contracts, have given rise to social and economic structures that differ significantly from those of the traditional art market – particularly in terms of market dynamics, ownership structures, and distribution forms. Inspired by Friedrich Kittler’s essays like Protected Mode and Unconditional Surrender (Kittler 2005), the first part of this article seeks to derive the social and economic frameworks surrounding NFTs from its technological a priori (Spreen 1998). To achieve this, I will conduct a comparative analysis of the traditional art market and the NFT market, highlighting the differences stemming from the technological characteristics of NFTs and examining these features with reference to the medium’s specifications. In the second part I will interrogate the tension between the artwork pertaining to its value and its status as a commodity. Thereby I will address the conditions under which artworks become commodities and the questions which arise from this process with regard to value and the artist’s labor. The third part will give an overview of artworks engaging with their own commodification and resulting market dynamics. By analyzing the underlying technology, it becomes clear that the NFT market differs from the traditional art market. NFTs can be generalized as digital assets authenticated by blockchain technology – a cryptographically secured database with a consensus algorithm ensuring transparency and verifiability – originating from an Ethereum Improvement Proposal in 2018.¹ While ERC-20 tokens (ERC-20 2015) can be likened to fungible, divisible currency, the ERC-721 standard was primarily conceived to represent non-fungible assets, as articulated in its definition by William Entriken, Dieter Shirley, Jacob Evans and Nastassia Sachs:

We considered use cases of NFTs being owned and transacted by individuals as well as consignment to third party brokers/wallets/auctioneers (‘operators’). NFTs can represent ownership over digital or physical assets. We considered a diverse universe of assets, and we know you will dream up many more: Physical property – houses, unique artwork Virtual collectibles – unique pictures of kittens, collectible cards ‘Negative value’ assets – loans, burdens and other responsibility (ERC-721 2018)

The unique tokens should, therefore, function as something analogous to a property title or as a proof of authenticity, with applications not exclusively limited to art². The ERC-721 token standard inherits many of its interface functions from its predecessor, the ERC-20 – with both transfer functions (ERC-20 2015) and the ability to assign transfer rights to a smart contract to third parties being identical. The main difference is the individual identity of each token characterized by a sequential number, the so-called token ID, as well as the individual reference to its associated metadata. This metadata (the ERC-721 metadata JSON schema) can then serve as a description and link to an associated good. In this use case, it becomes apparent that an NFT cannot be seen as a singular object but must be defined in relation to an underlying good. The specification points to the separation between the underlying good and its property title – and allows NFTs to act both as property title and distribution mechanism. The specifications of the ERC-721 token results in marketplaces and sales platforms being tied to the characteristics of this standard, resulting in interaction patterns which are based on trading platforms rather than galleries. While traditional art markets are bound to physical objects (e.g. paintings, sculptures) predominantly traded via galleries, auctions, and private sales – NFT platforms enable buying and selling in real time. In the following, I will compare the two markets. This will highlight their differences better.

2. The Market

Isabelle Graw defines the art market as the various venues where artists, gallery owners, and buyers come together, describing it as an “informal market” (Graw 2008, 66, translated by author)– which isn’t necessarily part of official statistics. Informal markets often contain characteristics that correspond to the precarious economic conditions of art production. From one perspective, artists and certain galleries operate without formal legal entities, leading to contracts often being established between private individuals. Conversely, artists don’t conform to a conventional model of wage labor, fostering an alternative and sometimes unhinged dynamic between capital and labor, as evidenced by the self-employment prevalent among most artists. Artworks sold independently or through galleries are typically produced in limited quantities, eschewing industrial mass production – though this does not preclude artists from employing industrial production methods. With this, Graw expresses a clear distinction between the art market and an organized market for industrially manufactured products. As Graw points out, an informal market has similarities to a “networking market” (Graw 2008, 67), such as those found in the financial industry.

“The market is always where a few market players come together and communicate with each other.” (Graw 2008, 67, translated by author).³

Therefore, the art market can be segmented into various distinct markets, as per Graw’s classification: Primary markets (galleries and first sales), secondary markets (dealers and auction houses), markets of knowledge (conferences, publications), markets of institutions (museums) and markets of major exhibitions (biennials). This structural division will aid in analyzing the NFT market, focusing on the primary and secondary markets.

2.1 NFT Primary Markets

To navigate the NFT market, it is necessary to distinguish between two different ways of selling (similar to the way Graw analyses the art market): Minting (the creation of the token and the initial sale, i.e. the primary market) and the secondary sale (secondary market). Minting itself generally consists of three technical actions: the purchase, creation, and transfer of the NFT. These three actions are typically bundled in a smart contract as a function that the user calls during the minting process. The purchase works by sending the correct amount of Ether (the currency of Ethereum) set by the seller to the smart contract. The smart contract then creates the individual token, i.e. an entry is generated in the persistent memory of the smart contract, which assigns a token ID to the buyer’s Ethereum address. The assignment of the token ID is followed by an event that signals the transaction of the token to the buyer. From an informational point of view, it is worth noting that in most cases, the creation of the token is initialized by the buyer. If the token itself is taken as the work of art, it would only be created during the process of the first sale – a seeming impossibility with physical works of art. However, even if the token is generated as a digital object in the minting process, the underlying smart contract has been programmed by the artist, so the artwork is not created through the process of minting.⁴

Initial sales of NFTs went largely unnoticed by commercial entities in the first few years after the establishment of the ERC-721 standard – only gaining recognition after the profits of platforms specializing in secondary sales became too significant to ignore. As a result, artists usually created their own bespoke interfaces and websites on which buyers could mint their ERC-721 tokens. However, the newfound attention that NFTs were receiving in the media led to increasing pressure to specialize the multitude of ways that NFTs could be used (collectable, artwork, community token) – resulting in the creation of platforms that could counter the mass of offerings with curatorial programs. These ‘communities’ developed rituals and models that were not dissimilar to those of the classical galleries: Pre-screenings, whitelists, and guest lists for certain events such as NFT NY showed how new intermediaries arose here as well, some of which demanded similar profit sharing as classical galleries. This development raises the question as to why, in a smart contract mediated market whose central promise is the elimination of the middleman, new middlemen simply arise in reality.

One example of this is Artblocks (Artblocks 2024), a platform for generative art. The curatorial program of Artblocks specializes strictly in generative art, mostly written in the Javascript programming language with the P5 programming library. The many collections of artworks sold by Artblocks thus formed a certain aesthetic direction, orientated through works by artists such as Casey Reas and focused on procedural software art. However, this also created an increasing dissonance between the implemented smart contracts and the artwork. Artblock’s smart contract system (Art Blocks Engine) (Etherscan 2022) enabled artists to create collections without any significant interaction with the smart contracts. The Art Blocks Engine is a smart contract that is designed to map hundreds of different collections and thus excludes individual programming from its architecture. The separation of smart contract and artwork becomes particularly clear here: in this case, the smart contract is no longer designed by the artist but provided by the platform. The artist is not only relieved of the distribution but also of the possibility of recognizing the smart contract itself as part of their art. Platforms with a curatorial program are, therefore, a double-edged sword: on the one hand, they enable consistent and curatorial stringency and determine distribution mechanisms; on the other hand, they run the risk of taking creative decisions and agency away from the artist.⁵ Over time, many digital launch platforms have been established (Artblocks, Verse, Fingerprints Studio, Folia, Quantum Art, etc.) that are united above all by the fact that they only mediate initial sales.

2.2 NFT Secondary Markets

While first sales are becoming increasingly important (as the number of second sales tends to fall), second sales have long been the focus of profit-oriented platforms. So, how is the secondary market structured for NFTs? If primary markets were economically insignificant, especially in their initial phase, the bulk of capital was accumulated on secondary markets, where artists could also profit from royalty fees on secondary sales. Due to the easy tradability of NFTs, enshrined in the specifications of the standard, a flourishing secondary market quickly emerged, which was subsequently dominated by a single platform between 2017–2020 called OpenSea. Founded in 2017, it quickly became the main hub and destination for trading NFTs, and in 2020, the platform had 4,000 active users who processed $1.1 million in transactions per month (Forbes 2021) – by July 2021, users were processing $350 million in transactions per month. While 200k users were still trading NFTs per week in May 2022, this figure has now fallen to ~33,000 (Dune 2025). These figures also show that little has remained of the initial interest. It is important to note that many of the NFTs traded on OpenSea are not art-specific – other categories such as games, memberships, PFPs (profile pictures), and music had and continue to have a large share of sales.⁶ The Art Basel Market Report reaches a similar conclusion:

Looking at the two most relevant segments of art and collectibles, art-related NFTs made up just 12% of the value of these two segments in 2019, but by 2020, had reached the majority share at 67%. However, since 2021, collectibles have dominated and in 2023, reached 84% by value versus only 16% for art (McAndrew 2024).

This does not mean that art collections are not traded, but that art NFT contingents only make up a certain share of the NFT market, which is proportionally small in relation to PFP collections. By 2022, up to 86% of all global NFT sales were being transacted via OpenSea. This is an unprecedented monopolization that can at best be compared to Google’s market share in search engine queries, and it was not until 2021 that the newly developed Blur platform was able to gain a significant market share over OpenSea. Blur, unlike Opensea, specializes in catering to professional NFT traders, and its interface design is more reminiscent of platforms focused on the trading of securities, such as Robinhood. Although ~59% of all NFT traders still use OpenSea, ~73% of the total volume of all NFT trades are now processed via Blur (Dune 2025), which is primarily used to trade well-known collections with large active trading volumes. Whilst Blur has a daily volume of ~11 Million Dollar (compared to ~5 Million Dollar on OpenSea), the number of traders is relatively small (~13,000 traders) compared to OpenSea (~20,000 traders) (Dune 2025). The strategy of targeting only a specific group of traders has thus worked: a few individuals trade large quantities of NFTs from mostly established NFT collections. The NFT secondary market is split between Blur and OpenSea, which together account for ~75% of the total volume (Dune 2024). The development of platforms such as OpenSea and Blur is possible because NFTs can be traded as purely digital tokens at any time and do not require physical delivery or a storage location. In addition, the ERC-721 specifications allow the seller/buyer to designate other smart contracts as intermediaries for the token.⁷ Marketplaces like OpenSea and Blur employ these functions in each sale: the seller relinquishes the right to transfer the token to the marketplace’s smart contract, and upon the buyer’s payment of the agreed price, the token is then transferred to the seller. As a result, a secondary market has emerged. It is characterised by a peer-to-peer structure (not unlike Ebay), facilitated by smart contracts.

NFT platforms for secondary sales, therefore, function fundamentally differently from the secondary markets of the art market. While auctions, sales by dealers, and art fairs can also take place online, the majority of the secondary art market is still offline. In addition, of the average 23% of online sales by galleries/dealers, around 20% take place via their own websites (McAndrew 2024). Only around 3% are brokered via third-party platforms, although these do not have a peer-to-peer structure either, but mostly promote sales by dealers or galleries. Here, the specific characteristics of the medium are also reflected in the market structure. On the one hand, the sales history of each NFT is transparent, giving the buyer a pseudo “provenance”, i.e. the chronology of ownership. Secondly, as digital tokens, NFTs are not subject to any change of state in the physical sense: while the owner of an oil painting can alter it through incorrect handling (transport marks, etc.), it is in most cases impossible for the owner of an NFT to change the underlying work of art.⁸ These characteristics would seem to make the terms of exchange simpler, as NFTs do not require condition reports, analogue certificates of authenticity, and where applicable, provenance reports, which are typical requirements for physical works of art.⁹ The secondary markets for NFTs therefore combines two seemingly paradoxical paradigms: it is centralized (with only two monopoly platforms) and peer-to-peer (a market structure that can only arise if purchases/sales are possible trustless e.g. smart contract mediated). As a result of this peer-to-peer structure, the frequency with which NFTs are traded differs significantly from that of traditional art markets. While artworks rarely or even never change hands on average, NFTs (at least historically) are often bought and sold with high frequency. This is particularly true of PFP collections, which are traded much more frequently than art collections. Nevertheless, it often happens that an art NFT changes hands 20 times a year, a figure that is relatively unheard of in the classic art market due to delivery times and bureaucratic hurdles. The frequency of buying and selling an NFT also determines the profit of the secondary platforms, which is why OpenSea and Blur optimize their interfaces for a high frequency of sales and purchases.¹⁰ OpenSea was valued at $13.3bn (Seward 2022) in its last Series C funding round, a figure that has certainly since been revised downwards, but still shows that the 2.5% fee charged on each sale generated huge profits for the marketplace at its peak. The technical characteristics of the ERC-721 are fully utilized in the secondary market interface. Together they provide the necessary conditions for the rapid and volatile price development of NFT collections, which is reminiscent of financial and derivatives markets.

3. Art and Commodity Form

In the previous section, the art object appeared primarily as a commodity that is traded on the market. In her analysis of the art market Isabelle Graw refers to Karl Marx’s economic theory of the commodity’s value (Wertformanalyse) at its center. The following analysis will touch on the question of how and whether a coherent Marxist explanation of value is possible for artworks and whether the concept of the commodity remains adequate to capture the economic framework of an artwork. This consideration is essential to understand the duality of NFT artworks – as property titles and as underlying artworks. Marx begins Das Kapital (Marx 1962) by analyzing the dual character of the commodity, which leads to an analysis of the value form. For Marx, the commodity is defined by an exchange value (Tauschwert) and a use value (Gebrauchswert) (the corresponding terms for the commodity here are value form and natural form) – the use value results from its practical utilization (a shovel is a tool that can be used as a means of production, a drink can be consumed, etc.), while the exchange value is constituted through social production. Marx makes this distinction to clearly understand and differentiate the types of labor involved in the production process. This involves the concrete material labor attributed to the physical production process, such as a carpenter building a chair. Additionally, a social exchange relationship is necessary to ensure that different forms of labor are comparable. This exchange value of the commodity results not only from the concrete labor expended, but also from the socially necessary labor time, which is realized in exchange (abstract labor).¹¹ Socially necessary labor time (gesellschaftlich notwendige Arbeitszeit) is a concept found in the beginning of Das Kapital (Marx 1962) which answers to the question of how different types of concrete work can be made comparable: Socially necessary labor time does not correspond to the real labor time measured with a clock and is not determined by the individual skills of the worker. It’s determined by the average time required to produce a product under specific social conditions with a specific degree of technologization. This means that the socially necessary labor time is constantly changing and cannot actually be measured in concrete terms. Michael Heinrich describes this the following:

Individually expended labor time is reduced to socially necessary labor time. Only the labor that is necessary to produce a use-value under average conditions counts as value-forming. How great the average productivity is, however, does not depend on an individual producer, but on the totality of the producers of use-value. This average is constantly changing […]. (Heinrich 2005, 49, translated by author)

However, exchange rarely correlates precisely with the value determined by labor time but does so on average. Marx introduces the price form as a special form of actual exchange value, measured in “money commodities.”

With the transformation of the magnitude of value into the price this necessary relation appears as the exchange-ratio between a single commodity and the money commodity which exists outside it. […] The possibility, therefore, of a quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value, i.e. the possibility that the price may diverge from the magnitude of value, is inherent in the price-form itself. This is not a defect, but, on the contrary, it makes this form the adequate one for a mode of production whose laws can only assert themselves as blindly operating averages between constant irregularities. (Marx 1976, 196)

This leads, through a brief derivation, from the commodity to the concept of market price. This price is defined on average by socially necessary labor time, which is only realized when the commodity changes into money. The commodity is a form inherent to capitalism, which constantly reproduces historically determined social values. As Karl Reitter describes: “The commodity form is therefore the most stubborn and powerful bulwark of capitalism against its overcoming. But it contains qualities and quantities that do not coincide with the form and are not determined by this form” (Reitter 2011, 67, translated by author). What emerges here in Reitter’s work, and is also found in the work of Etienne Balibar, are the empty spaces in the representation of value – certain labor, activities and social relations that cannot be grasped through representation as commodities (Balibar 2013).

What would it mean to develop a theory of value for works of art analogous to Marx’s derivation? An attempt will be made here, mainly to point out one of the problems of certain Marxist economic categorizations of artworks. The artwork is produced by the artist – this production process is, first and foremost, private labor, which is not yet mediated through capital relationships. This means that there is a concrete material labor process that requires energy, inspiration, concentration and professional knowledge on the part of the artist. The work of art is the product of private, concrete labor that has been expended.¹² Now, the artist takes the work of art to the market in order to sell it there. So how is the price defined? Following the derivation described above, in which value is reproduced in the price as an average value, the question shifts first and foremost to the attributed value. This highlights a key question in Marxist aesthetics that has remained largely unanswered: What can be understood by abstract labor, the main component of exchange value, in a work of art? How would a necessary social labor time (gesellschaftlich notwendige Arbeitszeit) be defined for a work of art? Even if there were a necessary social labor time for works of art, how would this be realized on average in money via the price form? The crux of any Marxist derivation of the artwork as a commodity under the law of value becomes therefore a clandestine definition of artistic abstract labor. This fundamental problem has rarely been formulated and has been largely glossed over historically. Graw approaches and describes the relationship between commodities and artworks as follows:

The moment artistic works circulate on the art market, they inevitably take on the character of commodities. […] Accordingly, their belonging to the capitalist system means that they are carried to the market and thus become commodified. (Graw 2008, 28, translated by author)

To summarize: Without a market on which it can circulate, the artwork is not a commodity. Only upon the art dealer/gallerist’s transference of the artwork into the market does it take on a commodity form. Graw further emphasizes the special status of the artwork as a commodity by finding characteristics such as singularity (production advantage) and an ‘aura of uniqueness’ (Graw 2008, 28, translated by author) in the artwork. These special commodity characteristics thus set art goods apart from other mass-produced goods. However, Graw also encounters the problem of the duality of the commodity as an object of use and a carrier of value – which she addresses by deploying Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic value. For Graw, an artistic work has symbolic and market value, and it is in this relationship that the social reception takes place. The symbolic value is fed by various factors such as

“singularity, establishment of the artist, promise of originality, promise of permanence […] or intellectual claim” (Graw 2008, 32, translated by author).

The symbolic value is thus strongly linked to reception and “the consequence of an idealistic charging of art just as much as an expression of its well-founded special position” (Graw 2008, 33, translated by author). What does this mean for an analysis of the value of artworks? Firstly, Graw has replaced the Marxian use value with Bourdieu’s symbolic value, while the exchange value is discovered again as the market value. At first glance, the replacement of use value seems logical because being useless is considered one of the characteristics of art. However, the replacement of use value highlights two problems: on the one hand, the entire Marxian value form analysis is based on the thesis that exchange serves to satisfy the need for the consumption of a product. Consumption itself is reflected in the use value of the commodity, which can also be the accumulation of value itself in the case of labor. On the other hand it is in the deduction of use value and exchange value in relation to the various forms of work where the contradictions become also apparent. If the use value is created by concrete labor does the same apply to the symbolic value? To iterate the problem: The general question of value is one of the specific production conditions of use value and exchange value. But since Graw replaces use value, the question of abstract labor (e.g. the production condition) remains unanswered still. Exchange value (and thereby price) remains as mysterious as before, as long as artistic abstract labor remains obscure. Additionally, instead of use value, there is now a symbolic value that is almost purely socially determined, similar to exchange value. One of the biggest problems with this categorization is not that it is, to a certain extent, self-referential (especially when Graw later explains that market value can also create symbolic value), but that artistic labor relations and practices (concrete and abstract labor, as well as productive and unproductive capitalist production) disappear in the analysis. As a result, value and the market price are largely left to the market because no relationship between value and social or concrete labor can be identified.

The price also has an unclear relationship to an extrinsic, intellectual production of knowledge, which produces a symbolic value. This categorization of the artwork as a commodity also overlooks essential aspects of its infrastructure: for instance, the relation between the artwork and productive capital, the role of galleries as commercial capital, and the direct link between artworks and financial capital. All of these aspects are subsumed under the usage of symbolic value. Marx’s derivation of the commodity and value form applies to capitalist production in general, where the socially necessary labor time is crucially related to value. However, while the commodity and value form are central to explaining capitalist production, they alone do not encompass the entirety of capitalist dynamics. The commodity and value form cannot fully explain capitalist production since Marx only finds a variable in surplus value through which capitalist accumulation can take place. In other words, for Marx, trade and the sphere of exchange always remain a zero-sum game (Reitter 2011, 85). Interpreting the work of art solely as a commodity in the sphere of exchange lacks the terminology necessary to describe the complex and not always economic relationships in which artists act, work and produce. I want to be more specific here: Socially necessary labor time is a fundamental building block in the derivation of Marx’s concept of value in the first volume of Capital. Incorporating the work of art as a commodity under the law of value would require a reformulation of the concept of abstract labor. I would also like to pose the following question: Why is it helpful to incorporate the artwork as a commodity under the law of value? Value in Marx is not defined normative positively, as in classical bourgeois economics, but is above all an expression of specific historic social relations. In addition, Marx himself shows that there are goods which practically do not fall under the law of value but nevertheless have a price.

Dave Beech aptly recognizes that the artist is not engaged in (capitalist) productive labor during the production of art (Beech 2016). The artist does not receive a wage for her labor, i.e. she does not sell her working time as a commodity. The surplus value is not diverted by any producer; it is not created in the first place. Beech goes so far as to state that artistic production is therefore not capitalist (i.e. unproductive) in the first place. The work of art, and here Beech agrees with Graw, only becomes a commodity at the moment it is introduced to the market by the gallerist. But even in this commodity metamorphosis, the situation is complicated: The gallerists, whom Beech defines as representatives of merchant capital (Beech 2016, 268), cannot pass on surplus value because it does not exist. In addition, most gallerists do not buy the artworks from artists, but only convert them into capital, and so therefore, the first step of the transformation M(oney)-C(ommodity)-M(oney) is missing. Commodities in industrial production are also produced for the market (i.e. exchange) because of the promise that they can be sold for profit by the producer (the laborer does not own the goods). While it can be argued that certain art is produced directly for sale, much of the art that enters the market as a commodity is not produced directly for it (for which the criteria of value in the art market are far too vague).¹³ Even if the commodity has entered the market, it does not appear sublimated under the law of value, but only retroactively defines itself as a commodity through the price form. However, this price form says nothing about the value, as there is no socially necessary labor time for works of art and no surplus value (as a surplus of labor time that accrues to the owner of the means of production) is produced. Beech’s theory of the economic exception of art as a commodity reveals very precise contradictions in the assumption that works of art are commodities. These contradictions could also explain why works of art were bought and sold long before the development of capitalist relations of production: the commodity form, which derives from a specific historical development, is retrospectively superimposed on the work of art.

4. NFT Artworks as Experiments with the Commodity Form

So, what about NFTs and NFT artworks? NFTs as a (non-art specific) medium have qualities of both property titles and commodities. NFTs have commodity-like qualities because they are bought and sold in what can be constituted as market transactions, which is due in large part to how their intrinsic technical functionalities are defined (e.g. the transfer and approve functions) (ERC-721 2018). Similar to commodities, NFTs are exchanged for money, the price of which is determined by the supply and demand in the market (although to reiterate, NFT art markets are primarily dominated by specific markets, which differs from the by and large ubiquity of traditional markets as demonstrated earlier in the text). NFTs also possess similar characteristics to property titles (ERC-721 2018), i.e. the buyer of an NFT normally acquires a digital certificate of ownership (the ERC token) that grants exclusive ownership and control over a specific digital asset.

With artworks, it becomes more complicated. Here, one would have to distinguish between two different types of NFT artworks: On the one hand, there are NFT artworks in which the token serves as a reference to an artwork (similar to the previous model/example) and on the other hand, there are NFT artworks in which the token itself is the artwork or an essential conceptual part of the artwork. In the first case, there is a clear distinction between the aforementioned property title/commodity form and the artwork, in which the smart contract code references an external medium via its metadata. The commodity form is thus visibly separated from the artwork; the smart contract is what defines the commodity; the NFT, acts as the title of ownership and only refers to an external medium, the actual artwork. In this first example, the commodity form is separated from the artwork proper. The artwork only becomes a commodity through the NFT because it enables it to become tradable through the market. Even if the NFT artwork takes on the form of a commodity, it cannot be sublimated according to any law of value, like an artwork on the traditional art market.

Now to the second case/example: If the token does not refer to an external artwork but becomes the object of the artwork, the token turns into an integral part of the artwork. What does it mean when an artist chooses to produce an artwork in a medium that is also a predefined economic form? Is a digital commodity form then prefigured during production, binding the artwork to a presumed market?¹⁴

In the art history of the 20th century, only a few examples can be found in which artists have developed a practice that acknowledges the commodification and integration of their artworks into financial systems. A historical analogy can be found in the series of works that Sophie Cras describes as “Experiments in Artistic Shareholding” (Cras 2018). In these works, artists like Les Levine and Robert Moore utilized market mechanisms and began incorporating financial market concepts into their art. Les Levine’s Profit Systems I (1969) consisted of a press release and an advertisement in which the artist announced the purchase of five hundred shares of common stock in the Cassette Cartridge Corporation for a sum of $2,375.00. Levine then sold them a few months later for $7,481.25, a net profit of 220 percent (Cras 2018). Before these works of conceptual art of the 1960s, Marcel Duchamp created Monte Carlo Bond (1924), in which the artist issued eight bonds worth 500 francs each and offered the buyers shares in his company. These bonds, which paid interest at 20 percent over three years, were intended to finance Duchamp’s gambling experiments (Cras 2018). Although they are financially worthless due to the guaranteed losses at the roulette table, a mixture of commodity form and of property title with interest, not unlike an NFT, takes place here.

In the following, I will discuss NFT artworks that explore different aspects of their inherent commodification to elaborate on the economic and social structures of the NFT market. In 2021, as part of the art collective terra0 I published an NFT called 2 Degree, which depicts a LiDAR scan of a German forest. The NFT is linked to a smart contract that stores the average annual temperature rise determined by NASA. If this value exceeds the threshold of 2 degrees Celsius, the token can be deleted by anyone who wants to call up the smart contract function and do so (terra0 2021). In the same year, the artist Sarah Friend published and produced the work Lifeforms, which she describes as “a lifeform that needs regular care in order to thrive” (Lifeforms 2024). Each lifeform is an NFT and must be transferred within 90 days in order not to die (in other words, it is deleted). The narrative conditions of both works are made possible by the transfer and burn functions of the ERC-721 standards – emblematic programmatic gestures that link the narrative, code, and the commodity characteristics. On the one hand, these works can be interpreted as an attitude of refusal that uses the programmability of NFTs to predetermine the behavior of the buyer. On the other hand, programmability opens up ways for artists to design the distribution and behavior of an NFT according to their own ideas. Friend puts it like this: “Lifeforms have been popular, I think – among other reasons – because they engage in an act of market-refusal or market-nonconformity in a context (NFTs) that has been notorious for its embrace of markets” (DEO CoLab Ventures 2024). In James Bloom’s work Gold from 2021 (Bloom 2024), the amount of Ether paid after a transaction influences the appearance of an NFT. The NFTs change dynamically after they have been transferred based on various criteria thereby functioning as a dynamic visualization of its own meta-market.

One of the first works to actively focus on its own pricing is Simon de la Rouviere’s Neolastics (2020). The mint price of Neolastics is determined by a linear bonding curve, i.e. a hard-coded price algorithm. The more Neolastics are minted, the higher the price to mint new ones. In addition, buyers can sell their NFTs back to the Neolastics smart contract at any time. The repurchase price is determined by the status of the linear bonding curve and paid from the reserves (accumulated through previous sales) of the smart contract. Neolastics not only plays with its own commodification but also introduces methods to create and discover the price of the artistic work (Rouviere 2020). A similar principle is employed in my previous work, Smol Dollar (2024): When a buyer mints a Smol Dollar NFT, a portion of the mint price goes into the reserve – however, the contract’s reserve is not held in Ether but in STETH, an ETH derivative that accumulates Ethereum’s staking rewards through constant rebasing (Smol 2024). In addition, the fees from secondary sales are periodically added to the reserve via the smart contract, meaning that the smart contract specifies and creates a sovereign price corridor to determine the floor price, not completely unlike a central bank. All these examples show that the commodity and property title-like attributes or characteristics of NFTs (which are inherent to the medium) enable artists to experiment with the distribution and price of their works through their programmability.

In the first part of this text, the NFT market was analyzed using public data. It was shown how the definition of the ERC-721 standard predetermined a market structure and how NFTs were used as a digital commodity form to “carry” digital artworks to the market. The underlying smart contracts pointed to the separation of artwork and commodity form: the NFT originally functions as a definition of functions for buying and selling, which is superimposed on the artwork. However, if artworks are understood as commodities (in the Marxist sense) with value, various questions arise: What is abstract labor in art production? Is artistic labor productive at all (in the sense of surplus value production)? These questions were discussed in the second part in order to highlight the precarious and often questionable position of the artwork as a commodity in capitalism. The third part looked at artworks that consider smart contracts and the ERC-721 standard as a medium themselves. The idea is not new – in modern art history, artists have dealt with the commodity form and value. However, when smart contracts with transaction rules are produced as works of art, a convergence of commodity form and artwork arises that is probably historically singular. What on the one hand can be seen as a process of appropriation (e.g. art is produced and conceived by the artist as a commodity) also opens up the possibility of questioning, modifying and aesthetically processing the characteristics of the commodity and its (non)-value.

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