Bitcoin artists
But while galleries and art dealers have mostly replaced this ancient system, a new breed of crowdfunded services like Patreon and Ulule are now lending even more fiscal independence to cash-strapped artists.
Despite this liberating disruption in the artist-patron dynamic, such services pose the same risk to the financial security of creatives as the old patronage system, the revised art dealership model capitalism brought, and the crowdsourced funding alternative facilitated by the recent technological boom.
Namely, that the artists are in a chronic threat of having their streams of income severed — at the drop of a hat. But thanks to blockchain tech and cryptocurrencies, creatives might have a new viable option to make ends meet without leaving their fiscal stability in the hands of profit-oriented dealers and corporations.
Boyart recently attracted the attention of the cryptocurrency community after one of his pieces made its way to the top of the Bitcoin discussion board on Reddit. Indeed, numerous Redditors flocked to salute him for his witty use of QR codes as a way of funding his work with Bitcoin BTC donations from inspired passers-by.
Influenced by the the vision of Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin, Boyart has made cryptocurrencies and decentralization a central theme in his work.
In his paintings, Bitcoin becomes not only an integral part of the piece itself, but also the very method by which Boyart can profit from his creation. The QR codes are both his statement against the dangers of central censorship and his weapon of liberation. In this sense, his artistic fascination with the technology is two-fold: When accessed, an immutable trail is left behind.
In other words, blockchain technology eliminates the need for a trusted third party to verify that a transaction has taken place. The financial sector—from major banks such as UBS and Deutsche Bank to the Nasdaq stock exchange—has been quick to adopt the nascent technology, largely for its capacity to radically drop transaction costs. But other sectors are seeing the potential too. In the art world, blockchain technology may hold the key to overcoming one of its greatest challenges: Frequently described as the last unregulated market, the art world often operates on trust alone.
But this trust keeps being tested, as recent forgery scandals such as the Knoedler Gallery fiasco and the case of German forger Wolfgang Beltracchi show. But this would require the trade to adopt the new technology, which it may be slow to do.
Ascribe, for example, offers artists a platform for uploading their digital works, securing their attribution and selling them. Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley-based start-up Blockai is trying to democratise access to copyright protection. The platform allows artists to claim copyright on their work instantaneously and shows them where it is being used. Blockai also acts as a fraud deterrent.
Other art-related blockchain companies include Verisart, founded by Robert Norton, the former chief executive officer of Sedition and Saatchi Online, which assigns certificates of authenticity to works of art. The art pricing database Artprice also launched a blockchain project in May.
Digital art, however, only makes up a small proportion of the art market. The real coup would be to bridge the gap between physical art and blockchain. George McDonaugh, a blockchain entrepreneur, offers a solution by combining it with tagging technology. A missing chainmark could reveal that a work has been tampered with.
Alternatively, fresh canvases could also be tagged with a chainmark. You could have the choice between a blockchainable canvas that attributes it to you forever, or just a regular one. For all the excitement the new technology is generating, many believe that the dangers of running a decentralised ledger are not fully understood.
Blockchain is particularly terrifying because it has such profound implications for governance, identity and global supply chains. It is also organising regular workshops on the topic, has released a film titled Change Everything For Ever and is due to publish a related book that will be uploaded onto a blockchain.