Established art cultures online and in the physical world won't be early adopters of NFTs. A crypto-native subculture will emerge around the medium first.
Let's look at two subcultures that may provide inspiration for how NFTs might evolve:
Photography was rejected by the art establishment until late in the 20th century, almost a century after it was invented.
Why is it that I can send anyone with an Internet connection and smart phone a photograph freely and instantly, but sending the same person money is hindered by seemingly arbitrary constraints, like geography or days of the week?
Until the arrival of crypto, sharing information online existed in a technically separate system and on different terms than sharing value.
Sharing information is Internet-native—defined by interoperable protocols and file formats, encoded as bits that can be sent independently between any two nodes in the network. Sharing value, on the other hand, has relied on pre-Internet financial and monetary infrastructure that inherited all the political and technological limitations of those underlying systems.
Crypto's innovation is infusing value exchange with all the desirable attributes of a digitally-native information medium—programmability, interoperability, composability, virality, transferability. Importantly, crypto solved the one major limitation of digital mediums that previously made them unsuitable for a purely digital representation of value—scarcity guarantees.