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Last updated: July 27, 2026
Digital art has moved faster than the books written about it. But that is changing.
With Who’s Who in Web3: Digital Art Books, we highlight some publications and editorial projects helping give this field more depth, context, and memory.
For collectors, these books matter. They help place artists and works within a broader conversation, and offer a way to engage with digital art beyond the screen, the drop, or the market moment.
Art on the Blockchain
Author: Valerie C. Whitacre
About: The development of blockchain technology over the last decade has had a far-reaching impact on the creation, ownership and trading of artwork, especially digital art. In an accessibly written text aimed at a broad audience of art-world readers, Valérie C. Whitacre demonstrates how the blockchain (a decentralised, distributed and public digital ledger used to permanently record transactions) continues to revolutionise our understanding of what can be considered a work of art as well as how art can be traded and consumed.
Publication Date: March 9, 2026
Type: Book
Collecting Art Onchain
Author: Kate Vass
About: Collecting Art Onchain - Public Edition is a book that expands upon and derives from the original Collector’s Edition.
Through interviews with collectors, the book attempts to document one of the most important shifts in contemporary art and internet culture over the last decade driven by blockchain technology.
Collectors featured in the book:
137, Antagonist4ever, Archivist, Benjamin “Benny RedBeard”, Colborn, Coldie, Collector B, Cozomo de’ Medici, Curated, DagieDee, Delronde, Doomed DAO, Eli Scheinman, Erick Calderon (Snowfro), Fanny Lakoubay, G4SP4RD, Georg Bak, Jason Bailey, Jeff Davis, Jediwolf, Justin Trimble, Kanbas, KarateKid, Kate Vass, Kenny Schachter, Larva Labs, Maerki Baumann Bank, Mimi Nguyen Wahed, Natalie Stone, NiftyNaut, NGMIoutalive, Punk6529, Seedphrase, Sebastien Borget, Seth, SuperRare John, VonMises, WangXiang, zaphodok
Publication Date: 2026
Type: Book
Digital Art : 20 Pioneers Redefining Its Boundaries
Author: Alessandra Mattanza and Introduction by Serena Tabacchi
About: An in-depth exploration of digital art, featuring artworks and interviews from 20 leading artists working with AR, VR, generative art, glitch art, data-driven art, and more.Art is rooted in the present and often anticipates the future, and digital art is no exception. In this groundbreaking book, Alessandra Mattanza, a seasoned journalist and contemporary-art expert, guides readers through the dynamic world of digital art. This book dives into the artworks, artistic philosophies, and creative processes of 20 renowned digital artists.
Publication Date: April 28, 2025
Type: Book
CryptoPunks: Free to Claim
Author: Edited by Yuga Labs and Zak Group
About: Winner of the 2025 Bronze Cube ADC Award for Book Design. A comprehensive monograph chronicling the phenomenal rise of CryptoPunks – one of the world’s first and most sought-after crypto collectibles and trailblazer for digital art and web3 culture.
CryptoPunks: Free to Claim explores the meteoric rise of a pre-eminent NFT collectible: what began as an experiment in digital ownership has become the catalyst for a digital art movement and a dynamic subculture synonymous with a new age of the internet.
Publication Date: December 10, 2024
Type: Book
Digital Art: 1960s to Now
Author: Pita Arreola, Corinna Gardner, Melanie Lenz (V&A, London, UK)
About: A new history of digital art from the 1960s to the present day, with decade-by-decade essays exploring evolving digital art practices, alongside interviews with artists, gallerists, museum curators and collectors. This is the global story of digital art from its earliest beginnings to the innovative work of today, encompassing wide-ranging, experimental practices, from computer-generated works on paper created by mathematicians, scientists, engineers, programmers and artists in the 1960s to interactive installations, virtual reality, net art and videogames. A collaborative, dynamic approach still characterizes the practice of today's digital artists, who employ technology as a tool while examining its social, ethical and political impact.
Publication Date: October 2024
Type: Book
AI and the Art Market
Author: Jo Lawson-Tancred
About: AI and the Art Market is the first book to offer an approachable introduction to AI for art-market professionals, considering AI’s impact on and possible applications within the art world, whether as a business tool or as an artistic medium. The two primary topics of how AI is affecting the art market, and the growing market for AI art, are united under the broad theme of how art-market professionals can be better equipped to work with AI in an art-world context, as relative novices.
Publication Date: October 31, 2024
Type: Book
Taschen Book “On NFTs.”
Author: Robert Alice (and contributors)
About: Encompassing the entire NFT ecosystem—from algorithmic art to avatars—the first major art historical survey of this field includes 10 academic essays and richly illustrated profiles of 101 key artists. Connecting the disruptive contemporary medium to its context in art history, this volume offers a deep dive into the sphere of non-fungible tokens and is also available for purchase in crypto.
Publication Date: April 2024
Type: Book
Right Click Save Book “The New Digital Art Community”
Author: Alex Estorick (and contributors)
About: Documenting a new community of creators and collectors, this is a selection of essays, interviews and roundtable discussions. Some of the biggest hits from our first two years for you to cozy up with.
Publication Date: February 2024
Type: Book
Crypto Art - Begins
Author: Andrea Concas and Eleonora Brizi
About: The volume tells of this exciting movement through the history and works of 50 crypto artists—including Hackatao, Refik Anadol, Kevin Abosch, Osinachi, Federico Clapis, Giant Swan, and DADA.Art—who contributed to its creation and form a part of it with their NFTs (non-fungible tokens) representing the present and future of this new world.
Publication Date: September 19, 2023
Type: Book
World of Art - Digital Art
Author: Christiane Paul
About: The fourth edition of the essential introduction to digital art, one of contemporary art’s most exciting and dynamic forms of practice. This new edition of Christiane Paul’s acclaimed book investigates key areas of digital art practice that have gained in prominence in recent years, including the emergence and impact of location-based media, interactive public installation, augmentive and mixed reality, social networking and file-sharing and tablet technologies.
Publication Date: May 9, 2023
Type: Book
Internet_Art: From the Birth of the Web to the Rise of NFTs
Author: Omar Kholeif
About: Since 1989, the year the World Wide Web was born, the art world has grappled with the rise of networked culture. This unprecedented survey of the artists and innovators in this area from 1989 to today is interwoven with the personal narrative of one of the leading voices on the digital world. In this book, Omar Kholeif, whose prolific career parallels the growth of the internet, tells the story of this mass medium and how it has fostered new possibilities for artists, both analog and digital.
Publication Date: April 26, 2023
Type: Book
Proof of Work - Blockchain Provocations 2011–2021
Author: Rhea Myers (and contributors)
About: A beautifully produced anthology of crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers's pioneering blockchain art, along with a selection of her essays, reviews, and fictions. DAO? BTC? NFT? ETH? ART? WTF? HODL as OG crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain.
Publication Date: April 11, 2023
Type: Book
Radical Friends
Author: Ruth Catlow & Penny Rafferty (with contributors)
About: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) offer unique tools for translocal peers to encode rules, relations and values into their joint ventures using blockchain technology. This new book, edited by Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, who have been at the forefront of investigations into the relationship between DAOs and the arts, constitutes over 5 years of research with essays, interviews, exercises and prototypes from leading thinkers, artists and technologists across this emerging field.
Publication Date: August 2022
Type: Book
Video/Art: The First Fifty Years
Author: Barbara London
About: Since the introduction of portable consumer electronics nearly a half century ago, artists throughout the world have adapted their latest technologies to art-making. This first-hand account by the curator who has been following video art from its beginnings in the late 1960s, when artists first adapted portable consumer technology to art-making, spotlights video’s ongoing importance in the art world, tracing the genre’s development alongside the advances in technology that have continued to open up new possibilities for artists.
Publication Date: January 22, 2020
Type: Book
The RAREST Pepe Book
Author: Eleonora Brizi and Louis Parker
About: “The Rarest Book” is a physical volume collecting 36 series of Rare Pepes, 1774 in total, along with essays that cover the history of the project and put it in context. It’s a fat paperback edition with a striking green cover, as playful and comprehensive as the work it covers. The Rare Pepe Blockchain Project shows the strength of social and memetic content for building community and value in crypto projects. This book is an excellent way of doing that and makes a strong case for the interest, value, and alterity of the project.
Edition: 300 volumes only
Publication Date: December 2018
Type: Book