Tad Smith@tadtweets
Most Art Becomes Worthless in the AI Age. A Few Objects Become Priceless.👇
Was browsing an auction of ancient coins this morning with AI help to set my own bidding strategies and began to think about how #AI forced me to refine my notions of value. Here is where “we” came out — hope it is helpful! 👀
Every new technology comes with the same assumption: that value will follow what’s new. That the latest tools will naturally replace what came before. It rarely works that way.
What usually happens is the opposite. As production explodes, value contracts. It gathers around a small number of objects that people keep coming back to, not because they’re perfect or beautiful, but because they mark moments when something genuinely changed.
The first real coins are a good example. They’re crude and uneven. No design to speak of. Yet they matter more than far more beautiful gold objects because they mark the moment trust stopped living in people and started living in things. Value became abstract. That shift still defines how the world works.
#Art follows the same pattern. The earliest Lascaux handprints aren’t impressive because of skill. They matter because someone reached across time and said, very simply, I was here. That gesture doesn’t age. You can repeat it, but you can’t replace it.
The works that last tend to behave this way. They don’t really compete. Competition implies substitutes, and substitutes imply replaceability. The most important works escape that logic. They become reference points. Other works are compared to them, explained through them, or valued in relation to them. They don’t sit comfortably inside markets. They quietly shape them.
This is why certain artists stand alone. Leonardo da Vinci matters not just because of his paintings, but because he represents a moment when careful observation became a way of understanding the world. Rembrandt made inner life visible in a way that still feels hard to fake. Andy Warhol collapsed art, media, repetition, and commerce into a loop we’re still living inside. Jean-Michel Basquiat embedded urgency and risk so deeply into his work that it still feels unmistakably human.
These artists don’t just belong to movements. The story bends around them. Their work often feels a little lonely. That loneliness isn’t a weakness. It’s usually a sign that the work arrived before the category fully formed. Markets tend to hesitate around things like that. Time usually doesn’t.
AI doesn’t undo this dynamic. It sharpens it. When machines can generate images, text, music, and ideas endlessly, scarcity moves. It stops living in skill or effort or even originality. It starts living somewhere else.
In a world where almost anything can be made, the rarest thing is clear human intent.
You can already see this in digital culture. The Bitcoin genesis block isn’t valuable because it’s elegant. It’s valuable because it marks the first moment trust was encoded without permission. $BTC
Early digital artworks work the same way. #CryptoPunks aren’t great images. They mark the first time digital identity, ownership, and scarcity locked together on-chain. Better images came later. The story didn’t move on.
We are left with a simple but uncomfortable asymmetry. We may produce infinite artifacts from here on, but a very small number will be clearly human in origin and intention. Those objects won’t just appreciate. They’ll slowly drift out of the pricing system altogether. They’ll be held, protected, and passed on.
Collectors who see this aren’t chasing returns or novelty. They’re acquiring things that feel inevitable. Objects tied to questions people don’t stop asking. Where did value come from? How did trust first take shape? What did it mean to leave a mark before machines could do it for us?
Those questions aren’t going away.
Neither are the objects that answer them.🙏
