It's been Nearly 10 YEARS ! We've still haven't figured it out, and I'm starting to think we might never do.
Physical art on the blockchain is what got me hooked up, and I keep seeing artists, collector and platforms trying to do things about it without having a clue of what they're doing !
I recall trying to intern at
@maecenasart @CodexProtocol @verisart back in 2017/2018 because i had read about their vision concerning the application of Blockchain systems in the art world in report like Deloitte, UBS , Hiscox and so on. Now those company are effectively dead and miss out on the digital art shift.
A shift that is much more adapted to blockchain systems I may add, for a decade we tried to have the art world to adopt the blockchain systems while it only took a couple of years for the Blockchain to adopt Art !
Anyways, here the thing, the act of "signing" and "numbering" either if it's on paper or on a decentralised ledger must be, in the mind of all stakeholders, sacralized.
NFT Physical pair does not exist from a patrimonial right perspective, it's just a re-edition of a limited edition of a digital artwork on paper or the other way around.
I for a while worked on a project of auction at Sotheby's called "lets get physical". I catalogued most if not all of the production of "NFT physical pair" in order to finally offer an opportunity to establish publically their mutual , independent and commune value.
Understand NFT on their own, pair, physical on their own, unmatched pair, sealed physical with pair/on their own and so forth.
I realized that most of the pair where splitted up and that most of the "physical" were signed and numbered as well, with nothing really linking them to their "counterpart". Some would keep the work "sealed" which is another funny impact of the collectable market on art.
Maybe that makes sense in the way that I highly doubt of the conservation of the physical work when they are on digital screen such like Infinite object, I give them less than 10 years of life spans when used daily.
The same goes for NFC chip, T.R.A.C.E by Transient Lab is user-friendly and I use it too, much easier than sending print across the world back and forth to be signed but it still lacks what it needs to be an industry standard.
When will someone develop a truly fool-proofed, transparent, publically available, non invasive, blockchain-based, provenance, traceability, documentation authentication solution ?
Maybe as long as certificate of authenticity arent recognized as legal document, as long as trad art professional benefit of the opacity and asymetry of information they will be no reason fo the industry to change.
Maybe we'll never come up with anything better than PUF (Physical Unclonable Function) I guess its a matter of education first, many collector, platform and even artist themself have no idea of what patrimonial rights entails to.
If we want to create new industry standards and have the world shift to our new paradigm then maybe just maybe we should take a bit of time to figure out what we are actually talking about.
How can we come up with a solution if we don't understand the intricacy of the problems physical art poses in terms of traceability, authentification, conservation and the lengths counterfeiters can go to when making fake art and documents?
Counterfeiters have worked with artists or their estate themself, in a market where the only factor of trust is reputation, the trust machine can really have a huge impact, it's a 65 Billion dollars industry after all.
Any company that have tried developing solutions about that always had the same problem at roots, they were either great technical guys with no connection to the artworld at all or the other way around. Dooms them from the get go tbh.
Let's recap in 10 years !