How the NFT boom has changed the game for generative artists — and what that means for the future of the genre

Generative art is having a moment. Artists who have long labored at the fringes of the art market are suddenly selling individual pieces for millions of dollars.

But they are also contending with the possibility that the rise of non-fungible token (NFT) art has cheapened the genre — and some are bristling at what they see as the appropriation of the term “generative art” by a new breed of crypto-collectible creators.

NFTs are a medium for storing and transferring ownership of digital art and collectibles on blockchains. According to The Block’s data dashboard, a grand total of $3.25 billion in NFTs exchanged hands on marketplaces like OpenSea in August — vastly outstripping the previous monthly high of $315 million in March.

Benefitting from the boom have been two different classes of artwork that both lay claim to the term “generative art.” Now, some veterans from the field of ‘traditional’ generative art, which tends to be abstract, feel their work is getting unfairly lumped in with projects like the wildly popular Bored Ape Yacht Club, a set of 10,000 images that were “programmatically generated from over 170 possible traits, including expression, headwear, clothing, and more.” 

What is generative art? 

But what exactly constitutes generative art is the subject of some debate within the artistic community. Broadly, the term refers to art that has been created by an autonomous system. That system, created by but not controlled by the artist, determines the ultimate form of a piece.

“We choose which kind of arrangements of the algorithm will lead to a surprising, even for us, result. We work with the system to give it some personality, some intention, some vibes, some soul,” says Anna Carreras, a day before dropping her “Trossets” collection on the NFT platform Art Blocks last week. 

Carreras has been a generative artist for 17 years. In the case of Trossets, a collection of 1,000 pieces that currently has a floor price of 1.5 ETH (roughly $5,900) on OpenSea, she coded from scratch a system composed of a horizontal grid made of squares. Each square then has a geometrical block “drawn” on it, creating a unique pattern.

The NFT boom has meant that artwork like Carreras’s is often mentioned in the same breath as “collectibles” like the Bored Apes — a state of play few generative artists could have imagined even a year ago.  

For some, collectibles are less generative art, more random item lottery.

“Generative art as a definition has been hotly debated among friends, peers and artists,” says Aaron Penne, a veteran generative artist whose Apparitions collection has generated individual sales of as much as 32 ether (around $125,000). “When I say generative artwork, I mean creating something beautiful with code, I don’t mean switching hats out on top of characters.”

Some projects now seem to want to distance themselves from hat shuffling. An upcoming campaign named NiftyRiots focuses on artwork that is representative of minorities. The project’s creators said on Discord recently that they use artificial intelligence to make “infinitely many possible artworks” centered on such items as Japanese Kokeshi dolls and African masks. 

Other projects use the term generative more loosely, they added. “What they mean is more ‘combinatorial,’ i.e. putting faces, bodies and objects together on a given background.” 

It is worth noting, however, that some creators whose artwork is essentially a mash-up of features — accessories, hair, facial expressions, backgrounds and so on — nonetheless see considerable artistic merit in their product. 

Take the 0N1 Force collection: “7,777 generative side-profile characters with over 100 hand-drawn features fighting for their existence.” These characters have sold for as much as 188 ether (around $715,000 at today’s prices). That particular item went to none other than YouTube star Logan Paul.  

Jakarta-based Bryan Lie is the artist who dreamt up the project’s component parts. CryptoSpaces and Strawberry (pseudonyms, obviously) then composed a system to render and distribute the characters to buyers. CryptoSpaces says they spent countless hours making sure the combinations work, ensuring that hairstyles and helmets, for example, didn’t overlap in an unsightly way.  

“I went through the generation with Strawberry, the first batch. I was just blown away. I also didn’t know how it was going to come out. I was afraid that some assets were really going to clash with another,” says Lie. “CryptoSpaces’ code. He just made it beautiful.”

Does 0N1 Force, then, constitute generative art? CryptoSpaces gave a nuanced answer: “It depends on your definition. It is not 100% generative like Art Blocks, Hashmasks or EulerBeats. In the sense that not all parts are generated by an algorithm.” 

But he argued that the art remains generative in that the final combination and image is determined by an algorithm. “And in our case a far more complex one than the BAYC one,” he added, because BAYC simply “stacks layers bottom to top.” 

‘A complete game changer’

What’s clear is that NFTs have changed everything for the generative art market. Most generative artists have labored in relative obscurity for many years leading up to this year’s NFT boom. 

“While many successful artists have large studios with lots of help, most generative artists haven’t been able to do that until very recently,” Dmitri Cherniak, an artist whose Art Blocks pieces have sold for as much as $5.8 million, recently tweeted. The current generative art craze “is not the status quo,” he wrote.

Penne, who is a friend of Cherniak, says the lineage of generative art dates back to the 1950s. “We’ve been doing this [generative art] in the belief that it belongs in museums alongside other artwork,” he says. “NFTs just suddenly shined a light on it in a big way.”

A few years ago, according to Penne, attempting to sell an individual piece for tens of thousands of dollars simply wouldn’t fly. The advent of NFTs has changed that in dramatic fashion. “It’s a complete game-changer,” he says. “Basically, if I sold a print for a few thousand dollars once or twice a month [a few years ago] I was very excited.” 

Generative art and NFTs present an alluring combination for speculative collectors because of the random aspect of the former. By minting an NFT of a piece of generative artwork, collectors are rolling the dice. They don’t know what the algorithm designed by the artist is going to spit back at them. What they are hoping for is to pay a relatively small sum to mint an NFT from a new collection — and to discover that they’ve bagged a particularly rare combination of features.

But the broader question is whether generative art’s entwinement with the NFT market could have a dilutive effect on the genre.

This may manifest itself in two ways. The first is that the market could become saturated by lower quality work as NFT creators seek to capitalize on the bull market. The second is that a lot of the investment in space becomes speculative — meaning buyers are more concerned with flipping their art for a quick profit than in owning art they truly connect with. The second of these outcomes may be positive in the short term but could hurt generative artists down the line if a sudden crash in the NFT market triggers a collapse in buyer demand.  

For now, though, the rampant speculation is not meeting much resistance from generative artists.

“I’ve talked with a lot of collectors of mine, of others, and there’s every possible type of collector,” says Penne. “And I love all of them because each one of them is another person interested in the medium that is my craft, and my friends’ craft.”

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