There's an interesting documentary on Netflix called Made You Look that deals with a lot of similar issues to this subthread.
Basically a scammer hired a master forger to create new/"original" paintings in the style of a few abstract expressionists (Rothko, Pollack, Motherwell). They came up with a fake provenance and sold them to a prestigious New York gallery for 25 years, making millions of dollars. The gallery then resold them to rich people for even more money.
They consulted the top experts in the world to authenticate them and no one raised any doubts.
Everyone was happy for a long time until the scam fell apart. They interviewed one of the people who purchased a fake painting and had hung it on her wall for years. She was furious.
As a nice little kicker, one of the attorneys on the case has a bunch of these paintings (which had been sold for millions a piece) hanging in his office.
Similarly, you can get a reproduction of a Van Gogh which would functionally be the same painting hanging on the wall. One of the fundamental value propositions in art is the history, in that discrete examples of art are representations of cultural history and historical artifacts themselves. By purchasing a piece of history the buyer becomes part of the history through its provenance. That is the difference between owning an original and a copy that is attempted to be emulated by art nfts.
Whether or not it will be successful is a different question, though the most prominent ones will probably remain collectable to some degree purely because they represent the first iteration of a historical precedent (digital scarcity in art).
Everyone can have the exact same monkey down to each bit, it’s just that you have a note on a blockchain that says you bought the monkey and no one else did.
It’s like if we had matter replicators from the Star Trek universe and anyone could print a van goh copy down to the same molecular structure and hang it on their wall, but you bought an impractical-to-forge piece of paper that says yours is the original.
I could write "I bought the monkey picture" on a piece of paper and put it in a sealed envelope and hide it in a drawer - same effect.
It only matters to people that it matters to. Anyone unconnected to the blockchain that stores this information doesn't give a monkey's about it.
Imagine that I and the monkey-picture-owner use the monkey picture as an avatar. They say "you can't use that, I bought it - look at this blockchain". I say "no I bought it - look at this piece of paper in the drawer". In general in society we would then have a court case and a judge would decide, and the police would enforce it. In this case - nothing. There's literally nothing the "owner" can do. If you can't enforce your ownership, in what sense do you own anything?
People buy NFT JPEGs and then put them as their Twitter avatars. Anyone can do that.