Art

Art World Looks to Blockchain to Pump Up Online Sales

Global sales of art works amount to roughly $45 billion a year, but in 2016 only $3.75 billion of that — less than 10 percent of the total — was transacted online, according to the Hiscox Online Art Report, making the art and collectibles trade a laggard in the world of e-commerce.

A big part of the reason for the lack of a more robust online marketplace is the high potential for fraud — already a $6 billion a year problem in the art world — when buying artworks sight-unseen except in digital form. Copies and knockoffs can be passed off as originals, “limited” editions can overstep their limits, certificates of authenticity can forged.

Verisart CEO Robert Norton

Several startups have have launched in recent years to tackle that problem, including Verisart, ascribe, and Tagsmart, by providing artists the means to assert their authorship and issue time-stamped, digitally signed certificates of authenticity (COAs) by registering the information on a blockchain. But online sales have yet to scale using that artist-by-artist, piece-meal approach.

Now, Burbank, Calif.-based Verisart is looking to go the wholesale route through a partner certification program and API for online sellers and galleries. Last week, it announced its first such partnership, with online gallery Avant Arte.

Under the deal, Avant Arte will apply Verisart’s certification standards across all its represented artists and sales of limited edition artworks. Each certificate will be optimized for both physical and digital use with a unique QR code, blockchain timestamp and web address.

Speaking at the RightsTech Summit in New York last week, Verisart CEO Robert Norton said, “As online retailers and galleries look to improve certification standards, we’re seeing increasing demand for blockchain enabled certificates and we’re delighted to work with Avant Arte as our first limited edition print partner.”

Added Avant Arte ATO Nico Veenman, “By partnering with Verisart, we’re applying two factor validation of ownership by combining a physical ownership certificate and a digital certificate on the blockchain including immutable and authorized information about the artwork edition.”

Avant Arte is the first company to use the Verisart’s partner API allowing bulk transfer of data and certificate customization.

(Cover image: Wikimedia Commons)

Blockchain: Good or Bad for Art and Artists?

An artistic project has launched a crowdfunding program to highlight the perceived negative influence of blockchain technology on art.

The project, based in the UK, aims to print an illustrated book titled: Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain to explore the effects of this new technology on the artistic fields. The funding will also go towards hosting a public discourse program in London. The project underscores some artists’ uneasiness at the thought of this new technology being introduced into the world of art.

Source: Blockchain: Good or Bad for Art and Artists?

How User-Friendly Are Museum Image Rights?

If you’ve ever considered downloading a digital image of an artwork from a museum’s website, you probably know rather well that the world of copyright is an incredibly murky and difficult one to navigate. Even if artworks are in the public domain — in the US, this means copyright has expired, 70 years after an artist’s death — many cultural institutions still claim copyright on the digital representations that they have created and share on their websites. While exceptions largely allow users to download these pictures for personal, noncommercial, or educational purposes, these online legal conditions are often still difficult to completely understand, or sometimes, even find.

Display At Your Own Risk is a primarily web-based experimental exhibition that examines the current status of digital cultural heritage and public accessibility to it through the online collections of some of the world’s most physically frequented museums.

Source: How User-Friendly Are Museum Image Rights?

Could Blockchains Solve The Web’s Image Attribution Problem? 

The success of Mediachain depends in large part on getting a lot of people to use it. For far, it’s secured some big partners—MoMA, Getty Images, and the Digital Public Library of America are all on board—but their next big step after securing funding is building relationships with more institutions and companies. That’s been a challenge—especially with art institutions that are reticent to even digitize their collections.

But Mediachain could solve that problem, too. “If a museum puts an image of an artwork online, it goes out all across the Internet and [museums] don’t know where it’s going without metrics or analytics,” says Nazarov. “One of the promises of Mediachain is it could enable you to know. We see it as enabling these institutions so they’re less afraid of opening their data. They could see open data as a business advantage to drive new types of engagement and interactions with collections and their organization.”

Source: Could Blockchains Solve The Web’s Image Attribution Problem? | Co.Design | business + design

Deloitte Demos Blockchain Use Case for Art Industry 

The use of blockchain data to establish provenance for artwork has attracted the attention of more than a few innovators and engineers in the space. Now, professional services firm Deloitte has unveiled its own approach to the use case.

Deloitte’s proof-of-concept, dubbed ‘ArtTracktive’, was developed by its Luxemourg office, and according to the firm, it seeks to provide a channel for distributed information sharing between artists, owners, galleries and anyone involved in the transportation of an artwork.

Source: Deloitte Demos Blockchain Use Case for Art Industry – CoinDesk

Music’s Middleman Problem: It’s Not What You Think

seabrook-will-streaming-music-kill-songwriting-690Venture capitalist and former music startup founder David Pakman has compiled some grim statistics on the survival rate of VC-backed music services. “Since 1997, according to PitchBook, approximately 175 digital music companies were created and funded by venture investors. Of those, approximately 33 were acquired by larger companies, often for less money than their investors put in,” he writes in a blog post on Medium, taken in part from testimony he gave last year before the Copyright Royalty Board. “Of those who have exited, I believe only seven achieved meaningful venture returns for their investors by returning more than $25 million in profit to their investors (Last.FM, Spinner, MP3.com, Gracenote, Thumbplay, Pandora and possibly The Echo Nest), representing an investor success rate of only approximately 4%, far below that of other internet and technology market segments.

France’s State-run Public Investment Bank Invests in Blockchain Art Project at Artprice 

Artprice plans to use the funds to invest further in its IT strategy and particularly their Art Market Blockchain – a distributed database containing specifications of years of complaints and lawsuits between the different segments of the Art Market chain and, notably, their relations with tax authorities and State judicial and customs services.

In the longer term the Blockchain will allow a considerable improvement in the payment of reproduction rights and other related rights to recognised copyright companies like the ADAGP in France which collects copyright duties in 43 countries.

Source: France’s State-run Public Investment Bank Invests in Blockchain Art Project at Artprice – Blockchain News

The Impact of the Blockchain Goes Beyond Financial Services

During the first generation of the internet, many creators of intellectual property were not properly compensated. Musicians, playwrights, journalists, photographers, artists, fashion designers, scientists, architects, and engineers were not only beholden to record labels, publishers, galleries, film studios, universities, and large corporations (vestiges of the pre-digital age) —these inventors now also had to deal with digital piracy that became possible on the web.

Blockchain technology provides a new platform for creators of intellectual property to get the value they create. Consider the digital registry of artwork, including the certificates of authenticity, condition, and ownership. A new startup, Ascribe, which runs on the blockchain, lets artists themselves upload digital art, watermark it as the definitive version, and transfer it, so similar to bitcoin, it moves from one person’s collection to another’s. The technology solves the intellectual property world’s equivalent of the double-spend problem better than existing digital rights management systems; and artists could decide whether, when, and where they wanted to deploy it.

Source: The Impact of the Blockchain Goes Beyond Financial Services

Everledger Plans Blockchain Database to Combat Art Fraud

Everledger, the London-based startup known for uploading specifications on 980,000 diamonds onto the bitcoin blockchain, has announced a partnership with Vastari, a fine art and exhibition database.

Vastari, in which Everledger holds an investment stake, acts as a middleman between art museums that are looking for new pieces and private art collectors that want to increase the value of their art by getting it exhibited in public. This new partnership will see the art information possessed by Vastari written immutably to the blockchain.

Source: Everledger Plans Blockchain Database to Combat Art Fraud – CoinDesk

As Authentication, Currency, and Inspiration, Bitcoin Finds a Growing Share in the Art Market

It took a crisis to spark off the next revolution in technology. In 2009, a year after Lehman Brothers’ disastrous crash and its subsequent domino effect on the rest of the financial sector, the Bitcoin was launched.

The concept of cryptocurrency, cashless and operating in a peer-to-peer network, had been around for some ten years but until the dawn of the New Great Depression no one had felt the need to explore it in depth. Its stability—the conversion rate has been hovering around $382 per Bitcoin for years now—is seen as a big plus in a world rife with speculation and wildly fluctuating share prices. During the first couple of years over one billion dollars were spent on Bitcoin and the technology supporting it.

Its anonymity fits the needs of criminals buying and selling illegal goods on Darknet sites such as Silk Road, but many progressive organizations now accept the alternative currency as payment. Bitcoin has also penetrated the art world and is rapidly becoming a platform for artistic creativity in its own right.

Source: ArtSlant

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