Consider the fees alone: I pay monthly fees for Shopify, for art printing and shipping, pens and physical materials, hosting my domain name and studio email, and so on. Not to mention the cost of my time (replying to emails, customer support, editing my store's website, etc).
All of this to enable revenue on my primarily digital art. I do enjoy making physical art prints, but I mostly work with software and code, and the art I make is better experienced digitally. Before NFTs, there was no established mechanism to earn revenue on digital art (primarily because there was no established mechanism to 'own' digital art), so I was forced to adopt physical printing and e-commerce despite it's high costs, annoyances, and generally poor return on investment.
In contrast, I can mint an art token on Hicetnunc for less than 25c USD. These fees do not go to a central platform like Shopify, but to the blockchain that helps maintain the provenance and permanence of the tokens I am distributing.
There are many other benefits of blockchain in this digital art space, I have written about it extensively[1].
[1] - https://mattdesl.substack.com/p/subscapes-part-1-preface
That's where it breaks down when buying stuff for me personally. Prints admittedly run into the issue of "walls get full", but I have not figured out a way to regularly enjoy digital art, especially since everything comes in different sizes and scales. Plenty artists I follow (you included ;)) now are on HEN, but that has kept me from getting into any of it, even though I get the limitations of prints.
There have been combinations of screen + digital art "subscription" in the past, which I never liked because of their closed nature, but maybe some amount of standardization/embedded display hints/... towards a more open variant of that will develop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27770605
Largely this question comes back to decentralization, trust, and a novel paradigm of digital ownership that is enabled by elliptic curve cryptography and blockchain tech.
The blockchain acts as a social consensus mechanism - we can all agree that "X public key owns Y unique token" - which is not the case with a centralized database record that can be mutated, or a file that can be easily copied/edited and shared.
When I buy a digital art token worth 1 XTZ (around 2-3 USD), it is closer to skipping my morning coffee for the chance to support an artist’s latest work, perhaps from an artist that I have been following for years on Twitter or Instagram without giving them any support besides Likes and Retweets (“exposure”). I have no intention of flipping or speculating on the art — but of course if there is demand for that token I may consider trading it, as it would give me even more XTZ funds to continue supporting other artists in this way.
I have not yet re-sold any Tezos NFTs, and I have bought hundreds from many different artists and illustrators. If none of these ever sell, I won’t feel like I have lost anything, because the value I see in this is not in the speculative nature of the asset.
And to your question: yes, many collectors appreciate the digital ownership aspect, and enjoy building out carefully curated galleries and showcases of their owned tokens, much like many traditional art collectors take pride in owning and displaying their collection.