century “tulip mania” in the Netherlands, where, “at the height of speculative frenzy” a single bulb of Viceroy tulip sold for “enough to buy a grand house in one of Amsterdam’s most desirable districts”, only for the market to collapse a month later.
If things seemed to have died down since, Bezuidenhout is convinced that the rise of NFTs are a turning point in art history. To him, it’s less about the tokens themselves than the technology that has been developed around them. The NFT is a sort of inbuilt certificate of authenticity. There is no faking the ownership of a piece, nor its history.
Speaking of middlemen brings us to Bezuidenhout’s final point: the massive decentralisation of the art market that the rise of NFTs has the potential to galvanise. For instance, the introduction of O’Flynn’s art into the digital art scene “exposed his work to a whole new segment of the market, the tech crowd that maybe traditionally weren’t that into art”.