The Rise of Bitcoin and Blockchain Art Exhibitions: Is it Reshaping the Standards of Art Value?

That's a great question. I'd say the word "redefine" might be a bit too strong, but it has certainly dropped a bombshell on the art world, exploding into a new, very prominent dimension of value.

Before we talk about how it changed things, we need to consider what digital art was like before. An image, a GIF – you could right-click and save it, I could copy and paste it, and no one could really tell which was the "original" and which was the "copy," because they were identical. This made it very difficult for digital art to command a high price; apart from the artist themselves, no one could prove that the file you held had any special significance.

Blockchain, especially with the later emergence of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), precisely solved this core pain point. You can imagine an NFT as a publicly accessible, unalterable "digital deed" or "certificate of authenticity" for a work of art. Artists can bind their work (like a JPG image) to this "certificate."

From then on, something magical happened:

1. For the first time, the concept of an "original" existed in the digital world. While the JPG image itself could still be infinitely copied, the whole world knew who held the "original" with the "certificate." This brought unprecedented "scarcity" to virtual items, and scarcity is precisely one of the core pillars of value for traditional artworks.

2. Ownership itself became a commodity. In the NFT space, many people aren't just buying whether the image looks good; they're buying the public record of "I own this piece." This record itself becomes capital that can be traded and flaunted. This was unimaginable before. Changing your social media avatar to a pixelated image worth hundreds of thousands of dollars is, in itself, a symbol of status and belonging to a certain circle.

3. Community and cultural consensus became key to pricing. Whether an NFT project is popular often doesn't solely depend on its artistic merit, but rather on the story behind it, the cohesion of its community, and whether it has become a cultural symbol (or "meme"). This is somewhat similar to how a painting in the traditional art world skyrockets in value because a celebrity owns it, but in the crypto world, this value effect driven by consensus is amplified countless times and happens much faster.

So, back to your question: Has it "redefined" the value standards of art?

My view is: It hasn't completely overturned the old standards, but rather established a parallel, entirely new set of standards.

The traditional art world values technique, aesthetics, art historical significance, and critics' opinions... these standards remain firm. The blockchain art world, or the NFT art world, places more emphasis on: verifiable ownership, digital scarcity, community consensus, and cultural symbolic attributes.

You can think of it this way: it's like a super cool, trendy exhibition hall full of neon lights and electronic screens opening right next to the Louvre. The criteria for judging "good things" are different in the two venues, but they both attract their respective audiences, and sometimes, audiences even cross over.

The emergence of this new exhibition hall has indeed allowed many digital artists to earn a decent income, or even financial freedom, from their creations for the first time, and it has also given rise to many unprecedented art forms. But to say that it has completely changed everyone's perception of "artistic value," I don't think we're there yet. It's more like an exciting experiment, and as for which works in this new hall will endure for centuries like the Mona Lisa, and which will be fleeting fads, only time will tell.