It is often said that NFTs represent a revolution, and indeed, something profoundly revolutionary happened in 2018 when William Entriken, Dieter Shirley, Jacob Evans, and Nastassia Sachs released the ERC-721 proposal for Non-Fungible Tokens on the Ethereum network. One could say that from that moment on, the concept of uniqueness or scarcity could be transferred to the digital realm. In other words, a new world was born—a digital world where the user experience is linked to unique, irreplaceable assets, just as in our everyday sensory experience.
This new digital world is rich with new meanings and new ways for users to interact, a novel approach to engaging with human creativity, creating a completely virgin and unexplored scenario for the art world.
It can be said that the NFT universe borrows, on one hand, the principles and lessons from the founding acts of cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, fully embracing the doctrine of decentralized value management and envisioning a self-directed, uncensorable community in control of its financial destiny. From an aesthetic and iconographic perspective, however, the NFT universe draws great inspiration from the convergence of visual developments over recent decades in the intersections of computing, technology, 3D graphics, and a certain type of science fiction connected to dystopian futures and potential metaverses. This subtle, subliminal graphic thread runs through much of NFT creative production, first in the world of collectibles and PFPs, and later in artistic NFT output.
Into this hot, pseudo-technological melting pot enters the internet culture of memes, some of which have gained massive visibility, such as the iconic green frog Pepe, borrowed from Matt Furie’s illustrations. The meme trend had already grown explosively with the advent of early social platforms, now somewhat forgotten, like Myspace, the primordial visual source of today’s immersive social world.
NFTs once again draw from this digital archaeology, particularly the genesis and development of the web, with the emergence of the first image exchange formats—such as GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format)—and the explosive rise of social networking platforms, from Myspace and 4chan to Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Facebook.
For this reason, today Pepe can be considered one of the symbols of this new era, an era that connects people regardless of geography, a fast-paced, hyperconnected world where the dissemination of visual taste and paradigms occurs at incredible speed.
Pepe thus becomes the iconographic paradigm of visual development in new communication, creativity, and society—an era with tighter rhythms, where deep reflection is often neither wanted nor required.
Many blockchain artists—crypto-artists, as we might call them—have explored visual reinterpretations of Pepe, which is particularly fascinating. If Pepe is considered one of the foundational genetic codes of the new visual lexicon of the digital era, a compelling parallel emerges with historical practices, where painters and sculptors often engaged with frequent subjects in religious iconography—crucifixions, depositions, annunciations, and so forth. Without being irreverent, one could suggest that a digital artist today revisiting the famous green frog is a contemporary counterpart to a Renaissance painter tackling a well-known scenario from classical religious iconography.
Every era has its icons and visual codes, and artists are among the most skilled at absorbing these codes and reinterpreting them, injecting their own expressive signature.
What we see today—even a meme—could become an iconographic motif for the coming millennia. What remains in the eyes, endures in history.
