NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, exploded into the art space last year, no doubt because Beeple (a digital artist) sold his NFT at Christie’s auction house for a staggering $69 million. Yet the story of NFTs is much more interesting, significant, and subtle than that sale.
Since the NFT phenomenon took over the art world, useful information that isn’t too reductive is in short supply. Artists, collectors, arts professionals, art lovers, and museumgoers are still trying to understand what NFTs are, how to benefit from or engage with them, and what they mean for the art world in the future. This book is precisely for this audience.
About the Authors
Amy Whitaker is a long-standing blockchain and NFT researcher in the arts and faculty member at New York University. She is the author of Museum Legs, Art Thinking, and Economics of Visual Art.
Nora Burnett Abrams is the Mark G. Falcone Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and a curator who holds a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
About the Publisher
Rizzoli New York joined such prestigious American institutions as Tiffany’s, Saks, and Cartier when it first opened the Rizzoli Bookstore on Fifth Avenue in 1964. In the following years, its landmark building in New York became the center for the company’s national expansion, adding new bookstores throughout the country and, a decade later, establishing an eminent publishing house renowned today for high-quality, illustrated books.
Rizzoli New York began its publishing operation in 1974 and has become a leader in the fashion, interior design, culinary, art, architecture, and photography fields. Rizzoli’s Universe Publishing imprint was added in 1990, marking Rizzoli’s entrée into the pop-culture worlds of humor, beauty, sports, performing arts, and gay and alternative lifestyles, as well as a highly successful calendar program. In 2011, Rizzoli established Ex Libris, an imprint dedicated to publishing up-market literary fiction and nonfiction with a transatlantic character. Starting in January 2018, Rizzoli produces its museum and exhibitions publishing under the new imprint Rizzoli Electa, in collaboration with leading Italian book publisher and sister company Mondadori Electa.