# After the Art World, Part 2

Source: https://outlandart.substack.com/p/after-the-art-world-part-2?triedRedirect=true
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/After-the-Art-World-Part-2?index=0x698271fa5426d6cf5635a30a5de47b6d38bd55b2a6287c1099b7b0730cb8b4d0fdb9b4fc
Submitted by misha on 2026-02-03 UTC, 1 upvote, 0 comments

## Summary

Brian Droitcour argues that some NFT art works largely outside the art world, where legitimacy comes from digital visibility and algorithmic legibility rather than institutional endorsement. Jill Magid's Out-Game Flowers (2023) arranges flowers collected from games such as Super Mario Bros. and World of Warcraft into bouquets that treat in-game power-ups as precedents for NFTs. Shezad Dawood's Sea of Redemption (2023) invites collectors to redeem, burn and trade NFTs in exchange for new ones, while Parker Ito and Xanthrax's Profile Pictures (2025) breaks Raphael's Pope Julius II and other paintings into modular traits.

## Article

Jill Magid: Hand-hacked Bouquet 1 (Out-Game Flowers), 2023. Collection of Centre Pompidou

When Jill Magid began working on her first NFT collection, she was thinking about what makes a digital object desirable. Similar questions run through her earlier projects, which look at how objects gain meaning as they move through networks of exchange. Out-Game Flowers (2023) extends this line of inquiry by identifying sought-after objects in video games, like power-ups, as historical precedents for NFTs, then literalizing that lineage by collecting flowers from games such as Super Mario Bros. and World of Warcraft and arranging them in bouquets. The works are simultaneously conceptual propositions, gamer in-jokes, and collectible artifacts. They stage contrasts of 16-bit pixelation against photorealism, of utility against beauty, while maintaining an ikebana-like attention to difference and balance. Magid’s bouquets are compelling because they present value systems native to games and NFTs without reducing them to novelty, showing how collectibles can possess aesthetic and conceptual density.

In Sea of Redemption (2023), Shezad Dawood engaged more overly with NFT-native mechanics, inviting collectors to activate his project through a series of transactional rituals. Dawood, whose work in digital and physical media often uses tropes of speculative fiction, invented a mythology of tentacled beings called Mermes that attach themselves to ocean life to form a rhizomatic civilization. Drawing on overlapping vocabularies of religion and finance, Dawood invited collectors to redeem, burn, and trade NFTs they owned in exchange for new ones from him, transforming speculative purchases into gestures of sacrifice and rebirth. Animals from popular PFP collections—like cats, penguins, and apes—were symbolically offered up to the aquatic Mermes, folding NFT culture’s totemic imagery into Sea of Redemption’s lore. The marine framework also echoes crypto’s own taxonomy of “whales” and “shrimps,” which ranks users by the size of their holdings. Rather than relying on artificial scarcity alone, Sea of Redeption sustained collector interest through narrative continuity and systemic play.

Magid and Dawood are two artists with lengthy exhibition histories who approached web3 as a place to engage with questions of collectability and desire. Their projects are distinct from high-profile art-world incursions into NFTs that treated the format primarily as a speculative wager. Damien Hirst’s The Currency (2021), for instance, asked collectors to choose between a physical painting and its corresponding NFT, a choice that resulted in the unselected work being destroyed. In short, participants had to bet on whether a handmade object or a digital receipt would prove more valuable. Hirst and his collaborators adopted the mechanics of NFT trading without fully engaging the cultures, narratives, or forms of play native to digital networks, maintaining a clear distinction between artwork and digital collectible even as they acknowledged a potential shift in these categories’ relative value. By contrast, Magid and Dawood worked from within digital logics, drawing on game economies and lore to rethink collectability itself rather than just testing its market appeal.

It’s also worth noting that Magid and Dawood brought nuance to NFTs that is missing from projects that embrace quantification more directly. In CryptoPunks or in the geometric abstractions released on Art Blocks, visual forms can be losslessly translated into numerical data. Traits are ranked, rarity calculated. For many collectors of such NFTs, the primary pleasure lies less in looking than in knowing how few exist, or how one token compares to the rest. Magid and Dawood’s projects engage with this statistical logic without surrendering to it. They treat traits not as clean data points but as libidinal charges. They share this with Evil Biscuit, an artist without an art-world background who produces conceptually ambitious work by pushing collectible logic to its limits. All three iterations of his Drifella project emerge from a milieu described as schizocollage or avant-gay NFTs, where artists exaggerate and overload the trait systems prized by rarity-minded collectors until those systems become murky, noisy, and strange. Collectability remains operative, but it doesn’t resolve neatly into hierarchies of rarity. These projects insist that collectibles can be about more than collectability, carving out room for cultural density inside systems designed for algorithmic legibility.

While Evil Biscuit represents a younger artist emerging directly from NFT scenes, similar experiments are animating artists who previously worked in net art and post-internet contexts and have since turned their attention to NFTs. One such artist is Parker Ito. In the 2010s, Ito produced maximalist paintings and installations that absorbed internet imagery while deliberately exceeding the camera’s ability to capture them. His NFT collections released in 2025 translate that impulse into schizocollage PFPs that cannibalize art history. Profile Pictures, a recent project he made in collaboration with Xanthrax, traces the three-quarter portrait format common to NFTs back to Raphael’s Pope Julius II, reiterated by Titian and later distorted by Francis Bacon. The collages in Profile Pictures don’t deploy these references as markers of authority. Instead, they breaks them down into traits, using art history as a modular source material. In Profile Pictures, the value systems of classical painting and PFP collections are set directly against one another. Composition becomes pattern. Historical gravitas gets reframed as a repeatable aesthetic resource. Meaning accrues through variation across the collection rather than through pedigree, sharpening the tension between the prestige of painting and the logic of digital collectibles that, consciously or not, inherit painting’s visual language.

Parker Ito and Xanthrax: Profile Pictures #760, 2025

NFTs can be a venue for self-reflexive art about collectability that doesn’t need art world validation. Profile Pictures makes this dynamic explicit. It cites art history not to reclaim its authority but to expose how its compositional logics circulate on NFT markets. Magid and Dawood, by contrast, draw on the visual languages of video games and science fiction, situating their work beyond the tastes that govern fine art. Evil Biscuit’s Drifella III approaches the problem from another angle altogether, using the imagery of the gallery and the logic of the installation shot to invert hierarchies from an NFT-native position.

In this context, references to art history no longer function as guarantors of legitimacy. They appear instead as fragments—styles, gestures, compositional formulas—that thicken mystique. NFTs largely bypass the art world, embracing forms of collectability native to digital networks, where legitimation comes from visibility and algorithmic legibility rather than institutional endorsement. The most compelling work muddies that legibility, flirting with measurement while insisting on what cannot be measured. What’s emerging is not a replacement for the art world so much as a parallel cultural configuration, one in which art and collectibles intermingle in an environment driven by statistics and play. In its strongest instances, this work produces an art that neither submits fully to quantification nor retreats into nostalgia for the white cube—an art that exceeds its container, even as it inhabits it.

Read “After the Art World, Part 1” here.

Brian Droitcour is the director of Outland.