Defining the 'Artwork' in NFT Art: A Review of Evolving Aesthetics

From the Aesthetics of Images to the Aesthetics of Systems, Communities, and Ownership

Two competing stories emerged around the NFT boom of 2021. One was about speculation. JPEG files sold for millions of dollars, while prices often appeared to respond more strongly to scarcity and reputation than to artistic quality. The other story was that the structure of art itself was changing. Blockchain seemed capable of reorganizing digital originality, ownership, and the relationship between artists and collectors.

Xinge Kong and Reza Moayer Toroghi’s 2026 paper, A Systematic Review on the Evolving Aesthetics of NFT Art, does not simply decide which of these stories is correct. It asks a more useful question: Has the boundary of what people experience and value as an artwork changed in the NFT environment?

The authors collected 3,239 publications from 2020 to 2025 and, after screening them, selected 18 studies that directly addressed the aesthetics of NFT art. Their argument gradually develops from this fragmented literature toward what they call “decentralized aesthetics.” To understand NFT art, they suggest, we need to move our attention outward from the image itself.

Value Moves Outside the Artwork

Traditional aesthetics usually treats the artwork as its basic unit. Color, composition, technique, form, and expression are examined as properties of the object. Some NFT studies follow this model and attempt to correlate measurable visual features such as colorfulness, brightness, saturation, and complexity with market prices.

Other studies produce a different picture. NFT prices and preferences are shaped not only by visual qualities but also by community size, scarcity, identity, participation, and ownership. A person who buys a PFP NFT may display it as a profile image, enter a social group, communicate with other holders, and use the token as a marker of affiliation. Looking at an image, owning an asset, and joining a community begin to overlap.

Scarcity produces one of the paper’s more interesting examples. In conventional collectibles markets, scarcity is usually expected to increase value. Yet one study reviewed in the paper found that extreme scarcity can reduce value when it prevents the formation of a sufficiently large community. If too few people own an asset, there may be too few people with whom ownership can be socially shared.

At this point, value begins to look less like a property contained within the object and more like something negotiated around it.

Walter Benjamin’s Aura Returns Through Blockchain

Researchers studying NFTs repeatedly return to older art theories. Kant, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Danto, Howard Becker, conceptual art, institutional theory, and relational aesthetics all appear in the literature.

Benjamin’s concept of the “aura” creates a particularly productive problem. Digital files can be copied indefinitely. According to the familiar logic of mechanical reproduction, the uniqueness of the original should therefore weaken. NFTs do not prevent copying. Instead, blockchain records which token possesses a recognized provenance and ownership history.

Some scholars therefore argue that NFTs restore a form of digital aura through verifiable provenance. Others reach the opposite conclusion, claiming that financialization further erodes aura by converting artworks into speculative assets. A similar paradox appears in relation to conceptual art. The historical dematerialization of the artwork, once associated with resistance to the art object, returns in NFT culture as an intense emphasis on ownership of an immaterial token.

The paper is equally cautious about claims that NFTs abolished the institutions of the traditional art world. Curators may disappear, only to be replaced by platforms. Galleries may be replaced by curated marketplaces such as SuperRare. Blockchain can verify provenance, while recommendation systems and platform curation determine what receives attention.

Decentralization, in other words, may relocate centers of power rather than eliminate them.

The Artist Becomes a Designer of Conditions

This shift also changes the role of the artist.

In generative NFT projects, an artist does not manually produce thousands of final images. Instead, the artist establishes rules, variables, algorithms, and possible outcomes. In interactive work, audience behavior enters the artwork itself. Smart contracts may determine when or how elements of the work are generated or transformed.

The paper therefore describes the artist increasingly as a system designer. Artistic intention no longer resides only in the finished image. It is embedded in code, rules, parameters, and procedures.

Community adds another layer. Artists communicate with collectors through social platforms, maintain narratives around projects, cultivate networks, and respond to participating audiences. These activities can influence both aesthetic reception and market value.

The artist consequently occupies several overlapping positions: maker, programmer, director, system architect, and community manager. The paper raises an uncomfortable but useful question for art education: should future artists be trained in coding, platform management, and community building as parts of artistic practice?

This question may survive even if the NFT market does not. Generative AI, interactive media, games, and networked art increasingly produce works in which authorship cannot easily be reduced to “the person who made the image.”

Decentralized Aesthetics: The Artwork as an Experience System

The authors gather these arguments into the concept of decentralized aesthetics.

Their model divides the aesthetic experience of NFT art into four interconnected layers: perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and socio-cultural.

At the perceptual level, viewers may experience a generative process rather than a fixed image. At the cognitive level, understanding the algorithm, smart contract, or conceptual system may become part of interpreting the artwork. At the emotional level, ownership, co-creation, community participation, scarcity, and price fluctuations shape the experience. At the socio-cultural level, avatars and collections operate as signals of identity, group membership, and cultural affiliation.

The implication is significant. The artwork can no longer be described adequately as a JPEG displayed on a screen.

Image + code + ownership record + transaction + platform + community + participation together form the aesthetic system.

The most important shift proposed by the paper concerns the boundary of the artwork itself. Value is judged less by isolated visual properties and increasingly through the depth and structure of the experience generated around the work.

A Question That May Outlive NFTs

There are reasons to be cautious about the scale of the conclusion. Only 18 studies survived the review process, and much of the existing literature focuses on the NFT boom period. The authors themselves acknowledge the shortage of longitudinal and cross-cultural research. The field still lacks evidence showing whether these aesthetic structures remain stable after speculative enthusiasm fades.

There is also a methodological inconsistency worth noting. The paper states that theses were excluded from the review, yet Coppelli’s study appears among the analyzed works and is identified in the references as a master’s thesis.

The strongest contribution of the paper is therefore not proof that NFT art has already established an entirely new aesthetic regime. Its contribution lies in gathering several dispersed transformations into a coherent framework. Value is moving across images, code, platforms, ownership, community, and participation.

That question extends beyond NFTs.

Generative AI, interactive art, games, virtual worlds, and networked media increasingly produce works whose artistic identity lies not only in their final appearance but in the rules and relationships that produce behavior.

NFTs may have been an unusually loud laboratory for this shift, complete with spectacular prices, speculative excess, technological ideology, and new forms of authorship. The paper ultimately points beyond NFTs toward a broader question for digital art:

When an artwork becomes a system, where does the artwork actually end?