Anti-NFT Art Through the Lens of Conceptual Art

Kang Kyeong Seok’s study approaches NFTs not primarily as a new form of digital art, but as a site where older questions raised by Conceptual Art return: ownership, authenticity, access, and the institutional production of value. While earlier scholarship has often emphasized formal similarities between NFTs and Conceptual Art, Kang focuses on their ideological discontinuity. This distinction becomes the foundation for his category of “anti-NFT art,” which includes practices by Rhea Myers, Right-Click Save culture, and ROBNESS.

Instructions and Smart Contracts: Similar Structures, Opposite Directions

One of the paper’s most productive comparisons is between the “instructions” of Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner and blockchain smart contracts.

Both operate through predetermined rules. Yet LeWitt’s instructions leave room for interpretation. Different people may execute the same instruction and produce different results, and those variations remain legitimate realizations of the work. Weiner goes even further: a work may be produced by the artist, produced by someone else, or not produced at all. The final decision belongs to the receiver.

A smart contract works differently. Its purpose is generally to reduce interpretive ambiguity and automatically execute a predetermined result once specified conditions are met.

The important difference, therefore, is not that one uses language and the other code. It concerns where decision-making authority is located. Conceptual instructions distribute part of that authority to human participants, while smart contracts attempt to embed it within code.

Dematerialization and the Return of Ownership

Kang develops this distinction through the concepts of “dematerialization” and “rematerialization.”

Conceptual Art did more than remove the physical object. It also challenged an art market organized around the ownership and exchange of unique objects. Yet even dematerialized works eventually returned to the market through certificates and contracts.

LeWitt’s wall drawings provide an important example. A wall drawing could be erased and recreated elsewhere, while its certificate remained unique. Kang emphasizes that such a certificate primarily authorized the official right to execute the work. Someone without the certificate could still follow LeWitt’s instructions and make the drawing, although it would not be institutionally recognized as an official LeWitt work.

NFTs move in a different direction. They attach unique tokens to infinitely reproducible digital files and reintroduce distinctions between an “original” and its legitimate owner.

Kang calls this rematerialization. No physical object needs to return. What returns is the structure of exclusive ownership. A digital file that could circulate freely becomes linked to a scarce and tradable token.

What Blockchain Records Is Not Necessarily What Is True

Another major argument concerns the “oracle problem.”

A blockchain can accurately record that a particular wallet minted or transferred a token. But it cannot independently determine whether the wallet owner actually created the artwork associated with that token.

Likewise, the media connected to an NFT is often stored outside the blockchain, on external servers or systems such as IPFS. The token may therefore persist while the file it references changes or disappears.

This distinction changes the usual discussion of NFT authenticity. The accuracy of a record and the truth of what that record refers to are not identical.

The paper’s diagram of the oracle problem makes this particularly clear. Tokens and smart contracts exist on-chain, while media files, metadata, and creator identities frequently remain off-chain. The blockchain can verify its own records more easily than the external reality those records supposedly certify.

From the Museum to the Marketplace

NFT discourse often claimed that blockchain would remove the need for galleries, curators, and other gatekeepers.

Kang argues that institutional power has not disappeared. It has shifted location.

In practice, users discover and trade NFTs through marketplaces such as OpenSea. These platforms determine visibility through search rankings, verification badges, interface design, and content policies. A blockchain protocol may be decentralized while the practical point of access remains highly centralized.

Here the paper extends the tradition of institutional critique from museums to platforms. Museums once distributed visibility through exhibitions and curatorial authority. Digital marketplaces increasingly distribute visibility through algorithms, interfaces, and platform governance.

The more revealing question is therefore not simply whether blockchain is decentralized, but who controls visibility and transaction at the point where users actually encounter the artwork.

Three Strategies of Anti-NFT Art

Rhea Myers provides the clearest example of internal critique.

Her Certificate of Inauthenticity uses blockchain certification to certify “inauthenticity.” If blockchain can supposedly guarantee authenticity, then it should also be capable of guaranteeing inauthenticity. By following NFT logic until it begins to fold back on itself, Myers destabilizes the authority of certification.

Her Is Art allows participants to change whether a blockchain-based work is currently classified as art. Artistic status becomes a variable state rather than a permanent property. Her Secret Artwork separates possession from access: someone can possess the token while remaining unable to see the work it supposedly represents.

In each case Myers does not reject blockchain from outside. She uses its mechanisms to make their assumptions collide with one another.

Right-Click Save takes a different route.

An NFT owner may possess a token, but another person can often save an identical copy of the associated image. The meme therefore exposes the gap between token ownership and access to the digital file.

More importantly, the meme performs its argument. It spreads precisely through copying, modification, and redistribution. While NFT scarcity depends upon assigning uniqueness to a token, the meme demonstrates the reproducibility of digital culture through its own circulation.

Kang connects this to Weiner’s emphasis on the receiver. The audience ceases to be merely a viewer or purchaser and becomes an active participant in determining what happens to the image.

ROBNESS and NFT burning shift the discussion toward destruction, value, and permanence.

Burning an NFT generally means sending it to an inaccessible address so that it can no longer be owned or traded. Yet the token and the record of its destruction remain on the blockchain.

This produces a peculiar digital condition: ownership disappears, but the record of its disappearance survives.

Kang connects this practice to Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing and Gustav Metzger’s Auto-Destructive Art. Yet digital destruction differs from physical destruction because even disappearance leaves permanent data behind.

The question consequently moves from scarcity toward time. Why should an artwork necessarily survive forever? What happens when permanence itself becomes a value imposed by technological infrastructure?

What Remains After the NFT Boom

The paper does not ultimately ask whether NFTs succeeded or failed.

Its stronger question concerns what the NFT experiment revealed. What exactly does it mean to own digital art? Why should ownership and access coincide? How much can technological verification establish authenticity? And what happens when supposedly decentralized systems produce new forms of platform power?

The paper does not conclude with a separate summary table, but its analysis can be condensed into three strategies.

Rhea Myers attacks certification and institutional authority from within the system. Right-Click Save performs replication and collective circulation. ROBNESS and NFT burning challenge ownership, accumulation, and permanence through destruction.

The larger insight is that similar technical forms do not necessarily carry similar values. Instructions, certificates, contracts, tokens, and code are all systems of rules. What matters is what those rules actually do: who receives authority, what becomes scarce, who gains access, and what can be copied, owned, or excluded.