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NEW

On NFTs

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Also available:

  • On NFTs. The Hard Code Edition
  • On NFTs. Collector's Edition
Edition: EnglishAvailability: October 7, 2025
Encompassing the entire NFT ecosystem from algorithmic art to avatars and AI, the first major art historical survey of this field is now available in an updated, unlimited edition and includes 11 additional artists. With 10 academic essays and 111 artists in total, the book offers an extensive insight into digital art on the blockchain today.
Hardcover, 7.7 x 10.0 in., 4.81 lb, 656 pages
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“The publication provides a comprehensive history of the NFT and is akin to a catalog raisonnée.”

The Art Newspaper
NEW
On NFTs

On NFTs

50

Art, Reprogrammed

A definitive guide to the art and impact of NFTs, now in a compact, budget-friendly edition

Formerly published as a Collector’s Edition, the first major art historical survey on the most compelling, disruptive area of contemporary art is now available in an updated, more affordable edition which includes 11 additional artists. A rigorous examination of all facets of the NFT ecosystem, it takes a multidimensional, artist-led approach to give a richer understanding of a topic often shrouded in pixelated mystery. 

Featuring insight from the leading voices in art and the blockchain, including Hans Ulrich Obrist, On NFTs celebrates unlikely and thought-provoking connections from across art history. Expect to find Rembrandts examined alongside CryptoPunk avatars, and 10 extensive essays explaining the nitty-gritty of NFTs—including Sol LeWitt’s influence on today’s artistic algorithms—plus behind-the-scenes glimpses of the creative processes of pioneering artists, from Beeple and Emily Xie to Snowfro and Refik Anadol.

In examinging the evolution of NFTs from the 1960s onwards, the author references artists and projects electrifying the digital art space up to the present day. With about 1,400 images and nearly 200 QR codes, readers can explore the works interactively and in rich visual detail. In addition to a glossary of terms, and a comprehensive exhibition history and timeline, there’s a survey of 111 key practitioners working today, with each profile uniquely authored by experts, including curators, critics, artists, and AI. 

On NFTs captures a seismic shift in art history, inviting both natives and newcomers to experience the bold, boundary-breaking future of creativity.

The editor

Robert Alice makes art, exhibitions, and books that explore blockchains and their histories. The first artist to auction an NFT at a major auction house, their work Portraits of a Mind (2019–) was pivotal to the NFT space’s growth. In 2023, the Monnaie de Paris held one of the first European museum solo NFT shows on their work. In 2022, Alice, who lectures globally, co-produced the first academic conference on NFTs at the University of Oxford. Alice’s work is part of the permanent collections of several institutions, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

On NFTs
Hardcover, 19.6 x 25.5 cm, 2.18 kg, 656 pages

ISBN 978-3-8365-9345-8

Edition: English
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Grid Reconfigured: Robert Alice’s On NFTs and the New Syntax of the Digital Avant-Garde

michael s.,August 19, 2025
In On NFTs, Robert Alice has not merely compiled a compendium of digital ephemera; he has constructed a discursive field in which the very ontology of the art object is reinterrogated. The book’s monumental scale—its 650 pages, its 14.6 kilograms of printed mass—functions not as spectacle but as a deliberate counterpoint to the immateriality of its subject. It is, in this sense, a dialectical object: a printed monument to the dematerialized gesture. What Alice achieves here is a kind of expanded field of art history, one that does not merely accommodate the NFT but reorients the axis of medium specificity. The blockchain, in his framing, is not a technological novelty but a structural condition—a new grid, if you will—through which the logic of conceptual art, systems aesthetics, and postmodern indexicality are reanimated. In his discussion of Kevin McCoy’s Quantum (2014), Alice draws a compelling parallel between the blockchain’s capacity for provenance and the historical avant-garde’s obsession with the certificate, the contract, the trace A. The essays within—by Anne Morgan Spalter, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Rhea Myers, and others—do not lapse into the breathless futurism that so often plagues writing on digital art. Instead, they perform a rigorous archaeology of the NFT, excavating its roots in algorithmic art, cybernetic theory, and the procedural logic of Sol LeWitt. The juxtaposition of Rembrandt and CryptoPunks is not ironic; it is symptomatic of a new condition of image circulation, one in which the aura is not lost but reconfigured through scarcity, code, and community B. Alice’s editorial vision is most compelling in its refusal to isolate the NFT from broader cultural production. The inclusion of outsider phenomena like the Rare Pepe Wallet is not a concession to kitsch but a recognition of the folk logic that underpins digital virality A. In this, On NFTs echoes the postmodern turn toward the vernacular, the marginal, the decentralized. If the historical avant-garde sought to collapse the distinction between art and life, then the NFT movement—at least as Alice presents it—collapses the distinction between art and code. On NFTs is not simply a book; it is a theoretical machine, a platform for rethinking the conditions of artistic production in the age of distributed networks. In sum, Robert Alice has not written a book about NFTs. He has written a book that performs the NFT: its contradictions, its exuberance, its radical potential. And in doing so, he has offered art history a new syntax—one that demands we rethink not only what art is, but how it is authored, owned, and remembered.