But with art there is only one work produced by an artist, or if a series, probably some way to properly id it based on a number of factors.
With say a sweatshirt produced by a third party based on some digital stencil art, do you know for sure the one you're receiving was printed by the company and given to an employee/customer? Literally hundreds, possibly thousands would be in circulation. How would you be able to distinguish that from say something a former employee w/ access to the original art data having it reprinted?
How do you guys ensure that the art is not a copy of another popular art work? Could customers flag an artwork saying it is pirated with information about original?
Obviously you need a way to identify the real artist. For example if they put their public key on their official web site, it would be a pretty good indicator.
People also used to create chains of trust with public key infrastructure. Maybe you trust Bob, and Bob trusts Alice, and Alice has personally met the artist at Burning Man and verified their key there.
Or you go to the government and let them provide a register of identities. In any case it is a separate problem.
If you can't verify the artist, don't buy the NFT, or only buy it at a discount, accounting for the risk. Forgeries are a problem with physical works of art, too.
I think that the way you get to the content is also important. If you are looking at a copy (good enough so you can't tell the difference) of painting by Rembrandt, you should be informed that it is a copy.
Same with words. Provenance for text will be a thing.
How do you know a signed print is really from the artist? If the artist themselves gave it to you, then you can probably be fairly certain. If the provenance of that artefact can be reliably tracked over the years, then you can also be fairly certain.
Obviously, a signed inkjet print can be forged more easily than a NFT, as it is just ink and graphite on paper.
But it's also possible for artistic works to legitimately have different pieces created by artists in different countries, and still be parts of the same parent company. An objective answer would require internal value accounting of an ultra-illiquid, ultra-sparsely traded good, which would be hard for experts to gauge, let alone accountants.
I am not sure what you mean by this. Are you referring to art being duplicated, or a digital signature? You can verify that its a forgery, or from a different account than the first author. The digital signature isnt something you can replicate. You can print another one, but you cant duplicate the property of "first" itself.
You're right that you do have to verify it's origin, but the benefit is that you only have to verify it once, then the entire chain of custody can be derived. With a piece of physical art, the original creator cannot just give you an identifier that allows you to, with 100% certainty, check authenticity. You need expensive, manual, and fallible inspection of the physical object.
It's not the same as selling printed copies or painting multiple painting. It's verifying that two different people 'own' the same painting but neither of them has guaranteed rights to it.
The analogy breaks down at a copied painting being hard to distinguish but a copied piece of digital art is literally impossible to distinguish, right down to its hash.
People who collect Picasso’s want the piece the artists hands truly created, that’s why copies hold no real value. By copying digital art you _are_ getting the work the artists hands created, the identical hash can prove it.
This is not attempting to prove something previously unknown, or resolve an active uncertainty of authorship. But if an artist claims ownership over a work/token, and collective history remembers and validates that claim, then you can prove that you own that token.
Not unlike signed art prints, or really any work distributed by an artist. Often these are certified by the artists themselves. For further reading, see [1].
Heck, then print out a certificate on some nice paper, state that the holder of this paper is the owner of the work, sign it, and stamp into some wax on it that has radioactive isotopes mixed in that can be used to date it.
You’ve got your NFT which the holder can then resell as you will. If the artist then sells another certificate claiming it is unique, sue them.
By tracking the location history of the object. That's actually how much of the art world protects against forgery. Forgers are very good at copying art works, but artists' estates keep a record of what an artist actually produced.
This is actually a subject dealt with widely in the humanities. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is a good start, for instance. It does seem odd for art to be valued by the market, but there are clear ways to construct standard valuation (based on utility, etc) around it.
some computer and printer somewhere can easily reproduce the piece if I ever need it again [...] well-defined manufacturing cost
This is not as straightforward as some might think! Some people agree with you. Some don't. "Fake" is a spectrum as well. Is it a reproduction of an original work, or an original work falsely attributed to a particular artist? In the second case, if the quality is high and scholarship has emerged around that work, is it "less valuable" to own after it is revealed as fake (for one individual, not at market prices) or is it in a sense more interesting? Is it perpetrated to be real or simply a print? Even if it's an authentic creation of the artist, was the work been authorized outside of their canon in a less official way? What about photographs, and later editions of them (by either the artist themselves, their estate or family, a dealer, etc)? Check out Richard Prince and his "decertifications" of paintings.
Startups offering blockchain solutions to this landscape, of course, are emerging. But they face the same problem everyone does in that market: how can physical assets, and their movements, be indisputably registered to a blockchain?
Ultimately there has to be a central authority to verify it or it's all just bits in the bit bucket. In that case it would be just as good to have a certificate of authority from the original artist or a contract of such
Of course, but a work of digital art, which is what we are talking about, is not scarce. There are infinitely many exact copies of it and each copy costs nothing to produce. Anyone pretending that one of the copies is more authentic than the others are kidding themselves.
With say a sweatshirt produced by a third party based on some digital stencil art, do you know for sure the one you're receiving was printed by the company and given to an employee/customer? Literally hundreds, possibly thousands would be in circulation. How would you be able to distinguish that from say something a former employee w/ access to the original art data having it reprinted?
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