The London-based artist Robert Alice makes art, exhibitions, and books that investigate blockchains and their histories.In 2019, he founded the Robert Alice Project to promote blockchain culture across the visual arts.Its first work, Block 21, paired a physical painting with an NFT and sold at Christie's in October 2020 for $131,250, the first time an NFT had been transacted through an auction.,
Block 21 belongs to Portraits of a Mind, an ongoing series Alice began in 2019.The following June, he co-curated Sotheby's “Natively Digital” NFT sale, where Alice, billed as the first intelligent NFT and made in collaboration with Alethea AI, sold for $478,800.,Alice has also worked with museums and galleries as an art historian, and has described NFT curation as a chance to bring that academic grounding to the medium.
In 2023, his Blueprints series was unveiled in the exhibition “Babel I” at La Monnaie de Paris, curated by Marlène Corbun of the platform LaCollection. A second chapter, “Babel II”, followed in 2025 with Stasis Fields, speculative images of explosions, drawn from the Monnaie's own blueprint archives, that explore the relationship between blockchains and time through the idea of the singularity.In March 2025, the Centre Pompidou acquired his 382181_Garden City, an NFT with an accompanying lightbox, becoming the third of his works to enter the National Collection of France and the first by formal financial acquisition.,His work is also held in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and, with five pieces, La Monnaie de Paris.
In 2024, Alice published On NFTs with Taschen, a catalogue raisonné of NFT art combining artist profiles, timelines, and scholarly essays, its title drawn from the treatise tradition of the Renaissance artist, art historian, and cryptographer Leon Battista Alberti. The original release included a 604-page Collector's Edition and a Hard Code Edition bound in a sculpted, perforated steel slipcase weighing 14.6 kilograms. A more affordable, 656-page trade edition followed in 2025, adding eleven new artist profiles and exhibition photography from institutions including the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, and the Serpentine. Its generative endpapers come from SOURCE [On NFTs], an algorithm trained on decades of writing on NFT history alongside a longer prehistory of democratic and cryptographic texts, from Laozi's Tao Te Ching to Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin Whitepaper.
