Non-fungible tokens allow collectors to confirm ownership of unique digital works.

The NFT craze is a huge opportunity for North Texas digital artists, who have often struggled to sell their work and exhibit it beyond social media, where it can easily be captured with a screenshot. Essentially art stored on a digital ledger known as a blockchain to verify authenticity and ownership, so-called non-fungible tokens have turned their works into unique digital assets that can be bought and sold.

Magdiel Lopez, a digital artist who designs posters that are mostly posted on his Instagram account with over 100,000 followers, has sold a handful of his works as NFTs.

“My collectors have all been followers before this NFT trend started happening,” Lopez says. “These people really appreciate my work, and they want to own it. A JPEG can be an original copy of a piece of work that belongs to a person, like a painting. Digital artists finally have a way to do some of the practices that were reserved for physical artists.”

Lopez thinks art has already been digitized for many for over a decade.

“Most people haven’t seen the Mona Lisa in person,” Lopez says. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t recognize it or enjoy it. You can maybe even enjoy it better than at a museum, where you get maybe two minutes in front of it before you have to move because there are people behind you. You can arguably get a better experience on your phone.”

Oil painter and digital artist Kelsey Heimerman is also making NFTs.

“Digital assets are not going away, and NFTs allow you to grow in that space,” she says. “It’s something that the world has been craving. I think that there will be a day when a collector’s house will be a total white-box space, and he’ll hand you a pair of like Google Goggles to view his entire art collection.”

She is also excited about artists getting a percentage — typically 10% to 15% — every time their NFT is resold.

“It’s a liberation of artists being left out of the wealth their creations actually make,” Heimerman says. “Before, we could sell an original painting that could later be sold for a million bucks, and we would never see any of that money.”

Along with Lopez, muralist Michael Shellis and designer Temi Coker exhibited NFTs earlier this month at a physical pop-up gallery.

“There’s a whole market that is even hungrier than the physical painting market for these NFTs,” Shellis says. “NFTs are going to change art for good. We live in front of screens now. I think it’s going to be a rare thing to go up to a wall and look at a physical painting. We’re always looking at our phones anyway, and now you can own art on your phone.”

“It’s like this renaissance for digital arts,” says Coker, who helped create the Oscars statuette this year. “It’s immortalizing digital art.”

Underwater photographer Jeremy McKane, who makes art that addresses environmental issues, is now using NFTs as a tool to spread awareness about marine pollution. For his latest work, McKane combines data on pollution in marine sanctuaries gathered by drones with a 3-D digital master of his photo of a mangrove, a shrub that helps stabilize coastline ecosystems.

“Our environment is leaving at an unprecedented rate, largely because of what we cannot see. The data that I am pulling from these drones identifies pollution, digitizes it and injects it into the JPEG in hex form, causing it to glitch, and at some point won’t allow it to open anymore.”

In other words, his NFT mimics the way pollution destroys coastline ecosystems.

“I think constraints breed creativity,” McKane says of the recent rise of NFTs, which he has been aware of for years. “And COVID was a constraint that a lot of artists felt. They couldn’t create like they were once able to.”

With an image that changes based on environmental variables, McKane’s work may be an example of NFTs ultimately becoming generative art.

“If it changes or adapts, it becomes a true living piece of artwork,” McKane says. “I think that’s where this is going.”

McKane acknowledges that there are many unimaginative NFTs and that some people are just interested in a cash grab.

“The real impact, which is why we create art to begin with, is to shift perceptions on how we see the world,” he says.

But Lopez thinks that money is reason enough to be excited about NFTs.

“A lot of digital artists are excited about being appreciated,” Lopez says. “There’s a lot of validation that comes with money.”