Traditionally collectors do have legal control over the display of a work even if it is digital. For instance a film artist may sell three editions of a short f

Traditionally collectors do have legal control over the display of a work even if it is digital. For instance a film artist may sell three editions of a short film and keep an artists edition for loaning to museums. If one of the copies is loaned to a gallery for a show then the owner might send a DVD or a digital file to the gallery. A gallery assistant might make a copy of the file, and watch it on their laptop. But they can’t show the film in public and doing so outside of the social and institutional context where it establishes its value would be 100% verboten. There would also be strong social norms against sharing the file online or with friends. It’s false scarcity but it’s maintained by everyone involved because it’s part of the ruleset that creates a functioning economy. Anyone who exhibited a work they didn’t own or have loaned to them would be an instant pariah in the art world. All of this has worked reasonably well for years without NFTs. It wouldn’t be uncommon for Jeff Wall to mail high resolution images of his work to a magazine and even though the art director that received them could go out and print a copy that would look like one of the three legal editions, it wouldn’t allow them to participate in the work. But they would get to hang a nice photo on their wall even though they would pay the cost of all their artist and artist adjacent friends would considering them a philistine. It’s possible that what we’re witnessing now is a true disintermediation of the institutions that make up the art world and the creation of independent pathways for meaning to be discovered and valuation to be determined. Is the art world changing or being disrupted by NFTs? Probably not really, they may be incorporated into art collecting in some limited way over time once the hype dies down. The social context is still missing in the idea of pure NFT collecting and is missing engaging with or recreating a culture of art appreciation and patronage. Beeple aside, 99% of the NFT stuff out there is much more of a mix of speculation, consumption, and more appropriate for collectibles than art. A lot of the content is basic meme stuff, and memes derive their value from ubiquity, and democratization. The ethos of Reddit where people won’t even repost stuff that has a small watermark on it is more appropriate for this sort of consumable than anything you’d apply the word art to. But I could be totally wrong, I definitely never anticipated what is happening now back in 2013 when bitcoin folks were going on about “coloured coins”.