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Other News

Art collectors and cryptocurrency investors went wild last year buying art that exists only in the digital world. Now, Desiree Casoni, a collector in Key Biscayne, Fla., is trying to figure out how to hang all her new purchases on the wall.

Ms. Casoni owns more than 500 digital artworks with her investor husband, Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile. Bored of swiping through their collection on a cellphone or laptop, the couple initially retooled a few television sets throughout their home, but that meant downloading files onto thumb drives and plugging them in. Ms. Casoni said they next dabbled with digital picture frames designed to run looping slideshows of family photographs, but said some of these models didn’t allow them to resize or crop images.

“I don’t want to look like we live in Best Buy, with chunky black screens all over,” said Ms. Casoni.

The couple even experimented by setting a projector on a plinth in a corner of their living room and pointing it at a blank canvas hanging on a facing wall. When they turn the projector off, digital pieces such as “Elephant Dreams II,” a surrealist pink landscape by Andres Reisinger and RAC, disappear. When it does, the white canvas alone “looks minimalist,” she said.

Collectors spent $21 billion trading digital art and collectibles last year, up from $67 million in 2020, according to digital-analytics firm DappRadar. Most of these digital artworks were attached to NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, which act as vouchers of authenticity on the blockchain for virtual goods, such as digital art.