In 2022, at the height of the NFT boom, The Wall Street Journal published a feature on one of the most pressing questions facing collectors: how do you display art that was born digital? At the time, I was working with the pioneering NFT museum Musée Dezentral, and the WSJ reached out to me to provide perspective on the issue.

In the article, I stressed a core truth: “It’s one thing to look at it on your phone, but great art needs to be elevated beyond the swipe and like.” This sentiment captured the challenge that collectors and institutions were grappling with—how to give digital art the cultural presence and permanence that traditional art enjoys. My contribution framed NFTs not as files to be stored, but as works demanding environments where they could be seen, felt, and experienced.

That moment in the WSJ was more than a personal milestone; it was part of a larger conversation about the future of digital art. To understand its significance, it’s worth revisiting the landscape of NFT display in 2022 and the creative experiments collectors and technologists were pursuing to bring digital art into physical space.

The Rise of NFT Collecting

The year prior to the article’s publication, NFTs had exploded into mainstream consciousness. According to analytics firm DappRadar, collectors traded more than $21 billion worth of digital art and collectibles in 2021, compared to just $67 million in 2020. Beeple’s record-breaking sale of Everydays: The First 5000 Days for $69 million at Christie’s cemented NFTs as not only an artistic phenomenon but a financial one.

Yet ownership quickly raised new questions. Unlike canvases or sculptures, NFTs exist primarily as entries on the blockchain paired with a digital file. That meant collectors who had invested millions were left asking: how do you show this off?

Experiments in Display

The WSJ article followed several collectors experimenting with ways to bring their digital art into their homes.

• Televisions repurposed as frames: Collectors Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile and Desiree Casoni, who owned more than 500 works, first tried loading files onto thumb drives and displaying them on TVs. But the process was clunky, and aesthetically, the black rectangles scattered around their house felt more like consumer electronics than art.
• Digital picture frames: They then tried smaller devices designed for family photos, but these often lacked resizing or cropping controls, leaving works misaligned.
• Projectors on canvas: One striking attempt involved a projector aimed at a blank canvas. When turned on, it displayed surreal pink landscapes like Andrés Reisinger and RAC’s Elephant Dreams II. When turned off, the canvas returned to minimal white, offering both presence and absence in a way closer to traditional art.

What these experiments showed was clear: collectors craved solutions that elevated their NFTs into something worthy of the art itself, not just screensavers in disguise.

The Market Responds

The demand for meaningful display soon created an industry of its own.

• Large-format LED walls: High-end collectors began installing micro-LED panels up to 6 feet wide. These allowed intricate works, like Refik Anadol’s data-driven Quantum Memories Probability, to be presented with the scale and intensity of a painting or installation.
• Specialized hardware: Startups like Tokenframe developed wooden-framed screens designed specifically for NFT display, while Framed sold NFTs that doubled as ornate digital picture frames to pair with artworks.
• Hybrid analog-digital creations: Designers like Love Hultén built custom arcade-style cabinets that played looping video works, while his collaboration with artist Lirona produced synth#boi, a limestone synthesizer that interacted with NFT visuals. These pieces blurred the line between artwork and display itself.

Even artists took control of the display conversation. Beeple’s HUMAN ONE, a mahogany box containing four synchronized screens, sold for nearly $29 million at Christie’s. Unlike a JPEG on a laptop, it demanded space, light, and physical interaction.

The Challenges of Display

The article also highlighted the technical and cultural challenges that remain central to NFT display:

• Cost: While a mass-market TV might cost a few hundred dollars, galleries like bitforms cautioned that it diminished the perceived value of expensive works. Purpose-built displays could run $14,000 to $150,000, making true presentation a costly endeavor.
• Environmental impact: Some collectors, like Ryan Zurrer in Switzerland, noted that running multiple large screens around the clock raised sustainability concerns.
• Cultural acceptance: For many, hanging a screen still didn’t match the gravitas of a painting. The framing, lighting, and physicality of traditional art were—and remain—benchmarks for legitimacy.

These issues underscored why my statement resonated. NFT art, to be taken seriously, required more than casual scrolling. It demanded elevation—both technically and culturally.

Why My Voice Mattered

My perspective in the WSJ wasn’t just about devices or display technology. It was about cultural framing. At Musée Dezentral, where I was working at the time, the mission was to provide digital artists and collectors with a venue that treated NFTs as serious cultural objects. Exhibiting NFTs in curated, elevated ways helped position them as more than passing digital fads.

By underscoring that “great art needs to be elevated beyond the swipe and like,” I helped articulate what many collectors were feeling but couldn’t yet define: the desire for digital art to occupy space, command attention, and be integrated into the fabric of lived environments.

Looking Ahead

Since 2022, the conversation around NFTs has evolved, but the core question remains: how do we integrate digital art into daily life? While the speculative frenzy has cooled, the lessons from that moment still matter. Digital art is here to stay, and the way it is displayed will continue to shape its cultural legitimacy.

From LED walls to hybrid analog displays, from metaverse museums to physical frames, the innovation lies not only in the art itself but in how it is experienced. As technology improves, the gap between digital ownership and physical presence will only narrow.

Conclusion

Being quoted in The Wall Street Journal during a defining year for NFTs was a recognition of my role in shaping this discussion. It placed my voice alongside collectors, curators, and artists all searching for solutions to one of the most pressing challenges of digital culture: how to make intangible art tangible.

NFTs are not just about blockchain or ownership. They are about presentation, meaning, and presence. And in 2022, the world began to realize that displaying digital art was not a technical afterthought, but the very bridge between the digital and the physical.

Learn more about my work: aaronjcunningham.com