Contemporary artist Philip Colbert, whose colourful, high-spirited art is finding buyers around the world, had been toying with the idea of creating his own catalogue system to prove the authenticity of his expanding body of work.
“A dealer in Japan who had been telling me I needed to have better forms of certification for my artwork, because people are buying art as an investment,” said the British artist. “At the end of the day when they (art) come to auction, the provenance is a very important element of their value.”
Then he met Rob Norton, the founder of Verisart, a US-based startup that’s using blockchain, the ledger technology underlying Bitcoin, to verify the authenticity of artwork. It’s a problem as old as art itself, said Norton, and artists have long been unreliable when it comes to documenting their own work.
Blockchain creates an immutable, traceable record of every transaction, whether it’s art changing hands or Bitcoin. Widespread adoption of the technology could give a boost to the market for art online, which has yet to explode. Online sales currently account for only about 8%, or $5.4 billion, of the global art market, according to a report by UBS Group AG and Art Basel released this month.
Trust—or lack of it—is at the core of the challenge, with potential buyers balking at the possibility of spending considerable sums on works whose provenance can’t be verified. Sources estimate the value of fraudulent activity in the global art market to exceed $6 billion per year and 80% of such activity is due to forgery, said Norton, the former chief executive officer of Saatchi Online and Sedition Art.
Colbert’s certificates contain small reproductions of the piece itself called “image hashes,” along with all of the relevant information about its creation, ownership and movement, such as whether it was part of an exhibition.
Since Verisart uses the unaltered Bitcoin blockchain rather than a customized version, one risk may be that their effort can be easily replicated, since it brings little in the way of new technology. Some collectors, particularly those who buy and sell privately, may also be reluctant to share their information in such a public way.
Ultimately, putting art on the blockchain could lead to a decentralized art registry that would cover a significant amount of the world’s art. “Over time, different registries will be able to share those image hashes and you could consolidate and build effectively a decentralized art registry,” Norton said. “There won’t be just one registry for all the art and collectibles’ markets but we do see the basis to build a decentralized title registry on the back of image hashes and cryptographic proofs.”