London’s House of Fine Art (HOFA) gallery is one of the pioneers of the crypto art scene, being one of the first venues to showcase NFT artworks in a physical space back in 2021.
Back then, it took a somewhat conservative approach, focusing on prints of CryptoPunks alongside physical sculptures and NFT-adjacent work.
This time around, its “Beyond the Screen” exhibition is dialing up the digital element, with vibrant screens displaying eye-popping animated work by the likes of XCOPY, OSF and DeeKay. But the word “NFT” is nowhere to be seen.
NFTs are “just a medium,” said NFT artist and collector Ovie Faruq, aka OSF, who showed Decrypt around the space. “It’s just like, do I have my painting on an oil canvas, or do I have a photograph? Or do I have a screen displaying some digital art? It’s just a canvas; it’s just a mechanism to transact,” he added.
Ultimately, he argued, “people will start buying NFTs without knowing they’re NFTs. And that’s the sort of thing that will get us over this, like, stigma that’s attached to it.”
“We haven’t used the word NFT at all for…