It's a stretch. Basically the speculators moved into NFTs, which scratched the gambling itch, and NFTs and other forms of crypto made money laundering much more straightforward.

The art part of the market - in the sense of original creativity that means something to someone - had become a footnote. And large parts of it were more about performance than craft.

So resale values collapsed, and now everyone is walking through the rubble and wondering if there's anything left to rebuild.

AI is both completely irrelevant to this and absolutely central, but for non-obvious reasons.

This seems ahistorical; by the summer of 2022 the NFT market had already collapsed (it died somewhat _before_ the art market did).

The quote is about art supplies, not speculation.