![]() ![]() On a vastly distributed internet, whose architecture has become largely predetermined by just a few monolithic tech giants, artists who produce works and share creations online now have a tool to verify that they are the owners of their content (and perhaps, for the first time, they can even make a profit from that content).Īrtists have imagined new methods for recording and authenticating their potentially “intangible” creative output for decades. Minting an NFT creates a publicly verifiable, traceable record, whose provenance is stored on-chain, and therefore is practically impossible to forge. What NFTs offer artists is a simple signifier for digital ownership - one that uses blockchain encryption to link a token (much like a certificate of authenticity) to a digital object, such as a generative artwork, text, or photograph. © 2022)Īs a cryptographic unit for record keeping, an NFT can be seen as analogous to a signature or an autograph. Yves Klein, “Zone de sensibilité picturale immatérielle Série n☁, Zone n☀2” (receipt to Jacques Kugel) (photograph courtesy Sotheby’s, Inc. The term NFT, short for non-fungible token, has been routinely misinterpreted as shorthand for a variety of unrelated subjects, from GIFs to cryptocurrencies to glossy 3D renderings or massive sets of PFP illustrations. ![]() But in late 2020, NFTs were introduced to the broader public. Watermarks, copyrights, DRMs, and DMCAs offered clumsy, inelegant solutions for asserting digital rights. And while concepts like property ownership and signatures have been applied to physical-world entities like artworks, deeds, or leases, they have continuously evaded us in our digital spaces. Suddenly, we were all publishers, devoid of signatures. When we look at our present moment - at how we’ve rapidly evolved from the printing press to the photograph to the internet - it’s clear that the internet has introduced a novel set of complications when it comes to claiming proof of ownership or maintaining that anything is an “original.” In the early 1990s, the World Wide Web entered our homes and - for the first time ever - we could convene with one other across geographic borders and share information freely across a global network. This methodology was developed slowly and meticulously over the course of hundreds of years. ![]() In modern practice, though, artist’s proof often denotes the first completed work that is identical to the other numbered editions. In the printmaking trade, the “artist’s proof” has historically referred to the impression of the first print, taken to determine the state of the plate, woodblock, or other surface. The entire art industry, as it were, has been upheld by expert appraisers, ledgers, and other means of record keeping to assess ownership, conservation, provenance, and condition. Rarity was central to the commodification of traditional art long before our present-day fascination with (or repulsion by) NFTs. Proof, as it so happens, has always been imperative to the authentication, management, and distribution of art across a global market. These on-chain transactions are constantly secured through cryptographic proof. Together, they generated a currency that could be stored in code, verified by a massive, shared, peer-to-peer network of transactions taking place on computers the world over. The prevailing myth of Bitcoin’s enigmatic founder posits that “Satoshi Nakamoto” is a pseudonym for a group of developers who aspired to create a digital currency that could exist beyond the government, banks, and third-party control. An image generated by Midjourney in response to the prompt “smart contract ascii art” (image via Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic) ![]()
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