What are must-have art NFT collections within a reasonable budget (under $100k USD)

Every voting week one of my works wins and is minted. I went through fifteen periods, from Fragmentation (2022) to Witness Marks (2026), and looked for the work with the most voting points that never won and, as far as I know, was never released. The ones that got away.

GAN Poetics Does an unfinished image ask more of its viewer than one that looks complete? And if so, what did we lose when the AI image field moved on to diffusion models, whose entire premise runs in the opposite direction: resolution, coherence, an image that looks like it was never generated at all? For a few years, GANs left a sort of fingerprint: a smear, faces sliding into one another, unfinished images. It recurred across artists who had nothing else in common but the GAN models, so consistently critics gave this a name: GANism. Was that sameness a limit of the architecture, or a portrait of the people using it, the datasets being used? If a thousand artists bring a thousand intentions to the same generator and get back one look, where does authorship actually sit? With the artist, the dataset, or the machine? 10 years later, artists, with access to the most advanced diffusion models, are now going back to those GANs to explore them as expressive tools. Diffusion models generate with a polish and control that GANs never had, but that polish arrives bundled with cost, with licensing, with infrastructure few individuals own outright. So where do artists go who want to keep working at the level of the pixel, the glitch, the visible seam, who find more to say in an unstable image than a resolved one? Is it strange that the technique researchers left behind is the one that remains open, inspectable, free to misuse, free to run on a laptop rather than rented compute? Does a technology's obsolescence to the field that built it create exactly the kind of margin an artist needs, a space left alone long enough to be reoccupied on different terms? Is the artist's retreat toward the older, rougher, cheaper GAN a nostalgia, or a refusal... a way of insisting that an image should still show its work, still carry the evidence of a process rather than disappear into polish? And as diffusion gets faster, cleaner, and more expensive all at once, is the open, imperfect GAN becoming not a relic but a position? A deliberate place to stand and ask what we actually want images to do for us? Here are some artists from the Daily Program @dailydotxyz who have explored these tools and aesthetics, each with their own unique intentions. 📺 7303711398_artificial_intelligence_wikiart_029 by @twt_cha_

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.

Some news!: I've joined @ArtBasel as the Global Head of Zero 10. 💥 I'll be focused on building Zero 10 into a year-round global platform, deepening relationships across the art and technology communities, and creating new opportunities for artists, galleries, collectors, institutions, and brands to engage with the space. I'm excited to build on the incredible foundation @eli_schein has created and to continue working together as we take Zero 10 into its next chapter. If you have thoughts, critiques, accolades, or ideas for Zero 10, I'd love to hear from you. Please DM me!

Eight legacy NFT collections are now preserved on Ethereum. Over the past few days I’ve published the story, technical details, and conservation journal for each one. Here’s the full index ↓

Hide your historic NFTs

DeepBlack - DeepBlack #18 has just sold for 0.249999 ETH ($669 USD) From: 0xbbb0…73de To: YogiEnl AI Artist: @DeepBlackAI