Last modified on Tue 16 Mar 2021 11.00 EDT But while the new cryptocurrency craze may have brought the high-end art market into the 21st century, itâs also modernising another aspect of the industry: art thieves. At their simplest, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, can be thought of as âbitcoin for artâ. Just as bitcoin created the ability to spend and save a sort of digital money without any centralised authority, so too do NFTs allow for pictures, videos, music, or anything else that can be digitally represented, to be wrapped up in a format that can be traded, stored or authenticated without needing to turn to a gatekeeper.