Avant NFT

Avant NFT
File:AvantNFT manifest.jpg
Promotional image from Remilia's 2021 blog post introducing the term "Avant NFT."
Type	Art theory / Financial art framework
Origin	2021
Field	Digital art, NFT, Blockchain

Avant NFT is a conceptual framework and art movement developed by Remilia Corporation over 2021 to describe a mode of NFT creation that treats the blockchain not as a distribution channel for digital art but as a site of experimental finance and collective performance, in contrast to existing blockchain art of the time. The term designates a practice where market infrastructure, community formation, and cultural production converge into a single medium. Rather than producing discrete objects for sale, Avant NFT projects explore how issuance, price discovery, and social interaction themselves become aesthetic form.

Avant NFT represents the blockchain-specific dimension of the broader New Net Art movement—its translation of New Net Art's philosophical and spiritual principles into on-chain practice. The framework positions NFTs as cultural infrastructure for organizing online collectives, "posting tribes," and digital personality cults through financial mechanisms.

Concept and definition

Avant NFT was articulated by Fang through 2021 in various communications, essays and tweets. She described it as "the merger of digital personality cults or posting tribes with market mechanisms," identifying this as the true innovation of NFTs as a medium.

According to Fang, an NFT project becomes "avant" not through visual novelty, but by integrating market and community dynamics into a unified social-aesthetic performance. The framework treats every component of an NFT's existence—issuance cadence, ownership structures, metadata construction, trading behavior, and social media engagement—as inseparable elements of artistic composition. Fang referred to this result as a timeline happening: a continuous ritual of discourse and participation in which the artwork is co-created through collective presence.

Avant NFT within New Net Art

Within Remilia's intellectual system, New Net Art functions as a post-post-Internet art movement that pursues experimentation in the network outside institutional frameworks. Where Post-Internet Art analyzed online experience and aesthetics for gallery contexts, New Net Art relocates artistic practice back inside the network, regarding the Internet—and, crucially, the market—as living material.

Avant NFT is the financial-technological expression of New Net Art wielding the blockchain to access self-made markets. It applies the movement's guiding ideas—such as Post-Authorship, Network Spirituality, and Network Art—to the specific affordances of blockchain media:

• Post-Authorship: creative agency distributed among holders, traders, and participants.
• Network Spirituality: economic exchange reinterpreted as ritual and collective belief.
• Timeline Integration: the social-media feed as both stage and medium for art.
• Finance art: the financial instruments of blockchain—mint, bid, auction, ownership, speculation—used as raw artistic material.

In this schema, Avant NFT accomplishes for blockchain markets what early New Net Art did for the Web 2.0 network: it transforms participation, data, and community into aesthetic form. The result is a mode of art inseparable from its circulation and market reality—where finance becomes the theater of the avant-garde.

Response to existing blockchain art

Avant NFT emerged as a deliberate response to what Fang would later term "Squigglecore" and "Firstslop"—approaches to blockchain art that emphasized technical novelty, algorithmic aesthetics, or conceptual one-liners over deeper engagement with the medium's social and financial dimensions.

While these conventional approaches to blockchain art often sought legitimation through institutional art world frameworks—emphasizing formal aesthetics and technical innovation—Avant NFT explicitly rejected these constraints. Instead, it embraced the generative PFP NFT format, a medium often dismissed as purely commercial or speculative by traditional art critics, and repurposed it as a vehicle for experimental practice.

Looking back in 2025, Fang would describe this distinction: "We have pioneered an entirely new avant garde with avant NFT, achieving entire new modes of art taking both finance and network art to scales previously impossible; 'blockchain art' has not done anything of any remotely similar note. Temporary prestige is assigned to the latter only because it's restricted itself to maintaining the mores and limitations of presentation in legible institutional form."

This positioning of Avant NFT as a radical alternative to established approaches to blockchain art was central to its conceptualization from the beginning, though the terminology to describe the contrast would only be formalized years later.

Milady as prototype

Milady Maker functioned as the first complete embodiment of Avant NFT. Rather than existing as a set of images, it operated as a live cultural organism—its market activity, ownership memes, and community performance forming the work itself. Fang described it as having "possessed the fraudulent space of 'NFT Art' and blown it up from the inside," converting speculative participation into artistic practice.

Through Milady, Avant NFT established a template for network-native art that was self-funding, self-performing, and socially totalizing—a "community-as-manifesto" rather than a discrete project. The model later informed adjacent Remilia initiatives such as Bonkler, extending the experiment into other financial and narrative forms.

Characteristics of practice

Projects identified with Avant NFT generally share the following traits:

• Hypercitationalism — dense metadata, references, and algorithmic chance generating meaning.
• Network art — social media discourse and ritual posting incorporated as performance.
• Post-Authorship — distributed creative agency across holders and participants.
• Community infrastructure — ownership serving as social architecture for cult or tribe formation.
• Financial experimentation — auction design, issuance rhythm, and price discovery treated as aesthetic structure.

These practices distinguish Avant NFT from both commercial NFT collectibles and institutional blockchain art.

Avant NFT Wave

Following Milady Maker's launch, Fang and Remilia launched the Avant NFT Wave in October 2021—a coordinated campaign encouraging other creators to adopt the framework. The initiative onboarded projects ranging from direct Remilia productions (e.g., Super Metal Mons, Mezzanotte) to looser affiliates onto the Avant NFT framework.

The Wave aimed to cultivate a peer network of avant NFT creators, but the campaign was ended by Remilia following the Milady Cancel of May 2022, with a focus turned towards Milady Jihad. Avant NFT continues to thrive with many of the same creators initially platformed under the Wave.

Reception and influence

Avant NFT's core ideas circulated widely across crypto-art discourse, providing a vocabulary for treating NFT practice as genuinely artistic experimentation rather than speculative commerce. While largely ignored by institutional critics, the framework remains influential in network-native theory and among researchers exploring cultural financialization and online collective identity.

In their criticism of art world responses to Avant NFT, Fang has noted an "art media embargo" that has prevented comprehensive coverage of what they describe as "the most impactful, influential movement in American art in the last 5 years." This tension between institutional art world recognition and network-native impact remains a defining characteristic of Avant NFT's reception.

See also

• New Net Art
• Milady Maker
• Avant NFT Wave
• Bonkler
• Post-Authorship
• Network Spirituality
• Hypercitation
• Remilia Corporation
• Charlotte Fang