The old adage goes that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Every art movement spawns its copycats. Every evolution of culture produces as much awful art as it does ones that change the course of history. Nowhere has this been truer than in the world of NFT art.

Read on as we discuss what NFT fails to be wary of.

Anything with a Bitcoin Logo

There is a certain type of poster that you only get in smoke shops or on stalls at folk festivals. It always involves an alien (who can be replaced with any popular culture icon) smoking a joint. It is a mystery who actually buys them.

Sticking a Bitcoin logo on your artwork is the digital equivalent.

We get it. Crypto is an exciting frontier, and NFTs are an art revolution. But when and art movements take place, the focus of their attention is usually experimentation and pushing boundaries.

Bitcoin is the figurehead (Though most marketplaces use ETH for transactions anyway) and without it, NFTs would not exist. But it is the facilitator that lets us sell digital art.

You don’t go into MoMA and see everything has dollar signs on it or the logo of the art dealer who sold it. Why are we doing it with crypto?

The same goes for the other identifiers you see on some NFTs these days. Nyan Cat, Doge, and don’t even get us started on Elon Musk.

CryptoPunks Ad Infinitum

Without CryptoPunks, the NFT as we know it would not exist. One of the earliest examples of a non-fungible token, they were given away for free in limited numbers. As such, their value has now rocketed.

CryptoPunks are pixelated images of a range of characters. Each is unique, wearing different hats, using different color palettes, and accessories. In fact, they were a unique proposition at the time and still remain that way.

What is less unique is the barrage of imitators. So far, we have had Kongs, Clowns, even CryptoPunks in fast-food chain uniforms. It is also very seldom these crypto collectibles have any association with the original innovators, Larva Labs.

Grimes

Six million dollars. This was the amount netted by cross-platform artist Grimes in her sale of 10 NFT pieces. Let that sink in for a minute.

Known as the WarNymph Volume I collection, some of these had multiple copies available, and others were one of a kind. A series of images, videos, and music, and one of them raised $389,000. This was the music video, which featured flying cherubs, swords, and a hazy, saccharine filter.

The music for Death of the Old, minus the high pitch autotune voice, was actually an impressive production. What I don’t understand is the awful artwork. Renaissance style themes and iconography are in abundance, mixed with some sort of interplanetary, celestial nonsense. All of this is in an odd, hazy filter. It is like your aunt asked Zak Snyder to design her church Christmas card. That being said, Grimes’ work itself may not be an NFT fail: did we mention the $6 million?

Cats

Everyone loves cats, particularly on the internet. So, it stands to reason that cats would be a subject of a fair few pictures and artworks. But not this many.

Part of this may stem from CryptoKitties, one of the first concepts to gamify the NFT. It was almost like an NFT version of Pokemon, but instead of battling, you could breed felines and make new creations. However, as is the pattern, copycats soon followed.

Mooncat Rescues, Cool Cats, and the obligatory Stoner Cats are all NFTs available for purchase at the moment. It’s not that they are all bad, we just want something a bit more original.

Mr. Brainwash

Carrying on the theme of rehashing the past, we come to Mr. Brainwash. For people who don’t know him, Thierry Guetta has been an active artist for more than a decade. He is most famous for being the obsessive street art filmmaker in Banksy’s movie Exit Through the Gift Shop.

That more or less sums up his career. A perpetual copier of that which has already been copied, no one is sure if he is actually real or a successful parody.

His style is a collision between street art and pop art. Essentially, everything you have seen before.

Brainwash’s NFT drop was one of the most underwhelming NFT sales in history. Snappy quotes daubed in spray paint style fonts? Check! Picture of respected historical figures with moustaches and mohawks? Check! It’s all so revolutionary.

Plagiarism Leads to NFT Fails

Downloading an image from Artfinder (or a stock photo site) and adapting it does not an artist make. In fact, this is even worse when someone passes off their work as a recognized artist. It is happening, and real artists are suffering because of it.

The reason for this is that the NFT collector’s world is still relatively small. Anyone putting their art for sale online is unlikely to notice if someone mints it as an NFT and places it on Rarible or Opensea. Thus a market has arisen where scammers are passing off art as their own.

Good NFT Art is Out There

Of course, it is always much easier to concentrate on the negative. Along with all of these NFT fails, there have been some outstanding pieces of NFT art worth noting, some of them featured in BitClout’s NFT showcase. We just want fewer Elon Musk images with Photoshop filters on, that’s all.

Spotted something so horrific you can’t bear to look at it again? Do you have turkey of an NFT fail lurking in your wallet? Let us know about it.