Why all living artists should create their provenance and self-sovereign identity with their art ?
By Daniel Chun
In todays’ art world, most art galleries and museums have specialists to conduct research on the history of artists, documenting all information related to the artists and the art work. This industry practice of attribution by researchers and scholars provides great value to the ecosystem that is relying on the experts, the science and the forensic approach to validating and valuing art — which is critically important to protect the value of the art and the collectors especially for masterpiece.
For living artists though, this is usually not necessary as they are mostly just in the beginning of their career in art and has yet to become a master. This dichotomy exists in many real world scenarios. It usually does take a new artist a long period of perseverance and art dealers a long period of promotion to find the matching audience and collectors. With modern online marketplaces and technologies, all living artists can now dictate their own pathway in provenance by using technology available today such as smartphones, perhaps to snap a few pictures of the process of a new project — keep track of each facets of the ideation and creativity and perhaps even using social media to engage his or her collectors and followers. This narrative of one creating its own provenance using technology could be extended further in how to create and securely ensure the provenance is trustworthy, reliable and immutable. This is the thesis that we have developed when we created ARTRACX — with a simple value proposition in building trust to facilitate track, trace and trade in art and collectibles for the mass — with cryptographic technologies.
During our discovery journey in ARTRACX, we spoke to Italian artist Francesco Lietti who is now based in Hong Kong about this need for living artists to create a legacy of his work — through provenance and creating value through beyond primary market. Francesco’s work on mixed media and urban narratives are well known to many of his collectors. His creative work is appropriately named as Colors of Asia — covering Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong metropolis.
We have collectively worked with different artists and art dealers and we shared our vision and capabilities of using chipsets and blockchain and a platform that allows them to create their own history for each piece of artwork — including exhibition history, owners, conditions, all through an online platform, an app, and with the smart chipset that could be attached to the art piece of authentication. This self-sovereign capability of associating the artist, the collector and the art work itself with an identity — creates value for everyone. We did also share that the opportunity of secondary sale income / commission that could be attributed back to him as the original artists is also possible (albeit very complicated). Conclusion is still a positive from the artists’ community who could still have recurring royalty for every future sale that could be tracked, traced and traded on ARTRACX. We first got to know Francesco through the Affordable Art Fair (AAF) as part of our research and he was intrigued about our ARTRACX. We got to know more about his work and we were excited that we could work together.
While our ARTRACX project is going through its development and testing phase, our team continued to do good with our OpenHeart mobile auction platform servicing charities. OpenHeart has recently sold (before the lockdown in Hong Kong) an art piece of Francesco Lietti (https://francescolietti.com)at a gala dinner hosted by the International Care Ministries (https://caremin.com) He was very pleased that our OpenHeart was able to represent him in a totally different setting and present his work, got it sold and best of all there are also proceeds that could contribute to the causes of the charity itself and also become part of ARTRACX’s inertia in our product roadmap.
Links :
https://Artracx.io
https://OpenHeart.hk
To see my other medium articles about digital economy and blockchain applications, you can go to this link
https://medium.com/@articulatehk
