# After the Art World, Part 1

Source: https://outlandart.substack.com/p/after-the-art-world-part-1?triedRedirect=true
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/After-the-Art-World-Part-1?index=0x694e5def55e11b751c8615f4492aebca5611eed069bc2b2bd159f5dad0db3b2d12fb89e9
Submitted by misha on 2025-12-26 UTC, 6 upvotes, 1 comment

## Summary

Brian Droitcour argues that the art world is contracting and that digital collectibles are reshaping cultural value, so the post-internet model of seeking institutional legitimacy through online visibility no longer defines the field. He points to Evil Biscuit's Drifella III, a 2025 NFT work that merges collectibles and art and mobilizes the installation view used in post-internet art. Droitcour cites the Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting, which reports that young high-net-worth individuals rank collectibles as equal to or more important than fine art. He also references Ben Davis's concept of "quantitative aesthetics," which Davis describes as an elite culture organized around numbers and metrics rather than connoisseurship.

## Article

Evil Biscuit: Drifella III #1110, 2025cl

Drifella and Drifella II are NFT collections released by the artist known as Evil Biscuit that use the familiar format of the profile-picture NFT, or PFP, while also breaking it apart. A silhouette of the titular character—part boy, part cartoon dragon—appears and disappears across iterations, borrowing the head-and-shoulders composition popularized by CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club while stuffing it with unrelated images, textures, and texts. The image gets congested, swollen with traits.

In Drifella III (2025), this excess expands into space. Each work shows a triptych installed in a room. Cartoon faces, abstract scribbles, and smeary Photoshop gestures hang in rococo frames or appear bare, as JPGs dropped directly into a virtual gallery. Grimy wallpapers and stock textures skin the walls and floors, where small collectible toys linger beside the paintings, like guards or familiars. Sigils and quasi-linguistic marks drift through the scenes, inviting viewers not to contemplate but to zoom. The works operate at multiple scales. Each one is simultaneously a picture, an environment, and a container—cute and diminutive, yet aggressively rich, too full.

One way to see Drifella III is as an image of categories dissolving. Collectibles melt into art; art melts into collectibles. The two no longer sit apart or in productive tension but absorb one another. This collapse resonates beyond NFTs. In a column published last winter, Annie Armstrong sounded the alarm about “red-chip art”: present-focused, fluent in the language of toys and collectibles, and indifferent to the values that structured 20th-century high culture. Evil Biscuit clearly loves collectibles, but his relationship to them also feels arch and critical. The density of texture, play, and reference in Drifella III keeps alive the memory of an avant-garde, even as it relocates that impulse to a different cultural system.

Drifella III is especially useful for thinking through the difference between contemporary NFTs and post-internet art of the early 2010s, because it mobilizes the installation view—an image format central to post-internet aesthetics—while putting it to very different ends. Post-internet art emerged alongside a new regime of online visibility: blogs, Tumblrs, Contemporary Art Daily, where installation shots circulated faster and farther than objects themselves. Artists made works that looked like they belonged in galleries whether or not they were ever installed there. Sculptures were designed less for bodily encounter than for the scroll: not for viewers moving around them in space, but for viewers moving above and below them on a screen.

An emblematic episode in the history of post-internet art was “Mirrors” at Reference Art Gallery in Richmond, Virginia in 2010: a virtual mockup of a white-cube exhibition that duplicated and idealized the gallery’s own slightly shabby space. This Photoshop twin became the backdrop for rendered sculptures. “Mirrors” enshrined the idea that legitimacy accrued through attention, and that attention flowed through images of art-world display. Post-internet art was not anti-institutional; it was hyper-attuned to institutions, using the internet’s circulation logic to accelerate reputation and visibility within the art world.

“Mirrors” at Reference Art Gallery, 2010

That strategy made sense at the time. In the first decade of this century, the contemporary art market was expanding, especially for young artists. Galleries were proliferating, museums were growing, and recent MFA graduates could plausibly imagine entering a system that rewarded online visibility with critical and commercial success. Post-internet art functioned as a means of working one’s way into that world, much as conceptual artists in the 1960s and ’70s used magazines and printed documentation to establish legitimacy quickly.

Today, the art world is contracting. Galleries that once supported emerging artists are closing. Instagram’s attention economy feels exhausted and extractive. Wealth is flowing elsewhere, and with it, cultural interest. Market analysts have noted declining enthusiasm among younger collectors for 20th-century blue-chip art. The annual Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting shows that young high-net-worth individuals now rank collectibles as equal to—or more important than—fine art, with digital collectibles regaining momentum after the post-2021 NFT crash.

Ben Davis has written about the context for these phenomena as the rise of “quantitative aesthetics”: an elite culture less invested in the trappings of high art than in numbers, metrics, and statistical fluency. Numerical literacy, Davis argues, confers seriousness in the way familiarity with the humanities once did. What emerges is not exactly a new art world, but something adjacent to it—a cultural formation organized around collectability rather than connoisseurship.

There is predictable resistance to this transformation. It surfaces in the pearl-clutching lament that the new rich no longer behave like patrons. They prefer toys and statistics to erudition. But “art” and “collectibles” are historically specific categories, not eternal ones. Both crystallized in the decades around 1900, when institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art professionalized curatorial authority and positioned themselves as stewards of world culture just as collecting became a mass hobby through baseball cards. The magpie urge to collect was split into exalted and base forms and kept largely separate through the 20th century. What we are seeing now is a destabilization of those categories: the ascendancy of trading cards as desirable cultural objects, the revenge of the nerds.

Takashi Murakami X RTFKT: CloneX #431, 2021

Art-world stars such as Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and KAWS anticipated this convergence by engaging directly with collectibles. But for them, the distinction between art and collectibles remained largely a matter of scale. A figurine is a collectible; size it up and fabricate it in stainless steel, and it becomes art. Koons’s “Balloon Dog” exists as shelf-sized miniatures for collectors who can’t afford the monumental versions. NFTs dispense with this logic altogether. In a digital environment, scarcity isn’t tied to material cost, labor, or physical presence. Ownership becomes an abstract affiliation—an entry on a public ledger—detached from objecthood and from the hierarchies that scale once enforced. This abstraction opens space for new kinds of play, a slippage between art and collectibles where neither category dominates the other.

Post-internet art, in retrospect, may have been the last avant-garde of an older system. It took the internet as a means of amplifying art-world legitimacy, accelerating reputation within institutions that still mattered. But for artists like Evil Biscuit, the art world is no longer the primary horizon of value.

The question now is not whether digital art can be in the museum, but what happens when it no longer aspires to. What kinds of work emerge when collectability isn’t seen as a diminutive mode of art, but as a native condition of networked culture? Answering that question requires turning to a very different kind of digital practice—one that treats the status of art not as a goal, but as raw material to be inverted, multiplied, and overloaded into something else.

Brian Droitcour is the director of Outland.

## Comments

**misha**: > The question now is not whether digital art can be in the museum, but what happens when it no longer aspires to. What kinds of work emerge when collectability isn’t seen as a diminutive mode of art, but as a native condition of networked culture?