The real business is being the technical middle man for creating and auctioning NFTs. I assume the cartel would just call you up, and you'd come up with an image concept, start press releasing about it, you'd either manufacture or hire an artist to take credit for it, and afterwards take 20% off the top for costs and profit.
Reminds me of when torrent sites used to sell desktop wallpapers.
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edit: That may be the advantage of NFTs as compared to physical art. To launder money with art, you need to create an entire literature, get galleries to buy into it, and run a few fixed auctions on other pieces by an artist in order to make the price seem plausible. With NFTs you can just claim that whoever is questioning them doesn't understand them, and vaguely point at past NFT auctions in general as a proof.