Blockchain: Cutting IN the middlemen
“You don’t understand, kiddo. As I reach the ending term of my existence, all paintings I produced during a lifetime furtively disappear from private and public records.” Earnest’s weary eyes were veiled with tears.
Earnest Ward’s bold strokes to direct viewers around the canvas earned him recognition as painter of the expressionist style. Two brushes used simultaneously were his favorite weapons.
Anemic, with a shaggy beard and grimy nails, Earnest rambles nervously around the workroom where he created a Spartan, but disorganized setup. Paints trailing across the table. Deserted shelves. A Christ on a cross.
His assistant sits and looks at him unperturbed. A slender young Italian, Filippo’s sharp features and bright eyes project a sense of ease and self-assurance. He opens the windows wide open. The light makes a mask of buoyancy.
According to local copyright laws, when a painter’s wife does not remarry after his passing, and then she dies, the signature to claim ownership of his artwork passes on to the children. Earnest does not have any.
In that case, if Mr. Ward’s wife does remarry, say, a nuclear scientist, and then she dies, the signature passes on to her husband, likely a person with limited knowledge of the quality or lack of quality of the paintings.
Terrified by this prospect, Earnest makes an urgent appeal to photograph and catalog everything. After putting all digital records on the computer, they start working on the hard copies. Presumably, these records provide the necessary information to authenticate his artworks in the future.
With a temperament suited to resist fury, Filippo silently reflected about the implications of an otherwise simple legal wrangle about copyright.
“Mr. Ward, do you trust the owner of the art gallery who shows and sells your work?” he asked, abruptly turning Earnest’s reasoning apart from the original course.
There’s something hidden in this question.
Images backed up in computers or hard copies shelved in racks suffer exemplary looting from time to time. Tech firms offering internet data storages also stand vulnerable to glitches and security break-ins. Anyone who buys electronic devices these days engages in strenuous exercise to recover original data from internet hosting services. Perhaps not a big deal for unimportant records. But the comprehensive, annotated listing of all artworks produced during a lifetime of an artist can ill afford faulty digital backups.
On this issue, apparently the art world seems to benefit from a new, safer bookkeeping technology. Although accessible online, it differs from the Internet. A solution of insane ingenuity.
In this new digital ledger, Earnest can connect and share his content with many independent computers (called ‘nodes’) which act as verifiers to observe and approve whether the record-keeping is originating from Earnest’s digital identity. Cryptography (a method of protecting information using codes) creates and protects Earnest’s digital identity by generating a secret alphanumeric code (called ‘private key’). All this without going through the security frailties of centralized tools like hard drives or internet file hosting sites.
Once the decentralized nodes complete the verification, Earnest’s inputs get timestamped in this digital ledger. Each of his timestamps form a secure record, a kind of digital seal that cannot be changed without redoing the entire validating process.
Digital timestamps are called “blocks”, hence the term “blockchain” to name the technology. Each block connects to all the blocks before and after it. Therefore, to tamper with a single record of Earnest’s art catalogue, a hacker needs to change the block containing that record as well as all those linked to it to avoid detection.
It is for this reason that Filippo raised the question around Earnest’s gallerist. Blockchains can’t authenticate artsy work. They secure the link between digital identities and the data these identities load into the ledger. To safely create and update his art catalogue in the blockchain, therefore, Earnest needs the support of an entity which is knowledgeable both of his artistic style and storyline. A trusted ally capable of accounting as to the dispositions of his paintings. An agent who deals fairly and honestly with him.
Earnest Ward and Filippo represent fictional characters. Their security anxieties about authentication do not.
Director of Galeria Aura, a contemporary art gallery based in São Paulo focusing on Brazilian emerging artists, Bruna Bailune kindly accepted my invitation to write a note on this regard:
“It is advised for gallery owners and buyers who enter the blockchain to become more familiar with this control tool and use it to check which timestamp of the blockchain is behind the real artwork and where the physical art is stored. To discern, in other words, what is in and out of the blockchain. In doing so, traditional galleries can achieve success in adopting innovative technologies to honor their duties to care for and manage consigned artworks.
Authenticating what is being sold requires caution. The same challenges of cataloguing and selling traditional art — issuing certificates of authenticity, proving funds for payments, evaluating provenance record of each artwork — are gradually moving into the blockchain-registered market. Professionals of many disciplines in the art world — researchers, art conservators, gallery owners, restorers, merchants, and curators- can also help artists to get their work verified and registered on the blockchain to better equip them for the art market.”
PS: 8-year-old Marina Temperani Bertuzzo produced the two paintings featured in this article. With the consent of her parents, both were tokenized in the blockchain within the collection: https://opensea.io/assets/brazilian-arte
