The Glorious Revolution in the Art World:
Why is provenance so resistant to clarity, and how do art-world insiders employ blockchain technology to say no
Every year thousands of thousands of artworks are sent to appraisal for tax, donation, insurance, and many other purposes. Appraisals are meant to be fair and neutral, indifferent to any related intentions.
Supposedly, yes; yet in reality, oftentimes appraisals might be as opaque as the rest of the art world.
Attempts to change are many. Facing the Kafkaesque castle that houses the work of art, few people have till today shaken the foundation of the system, a system that protects the art-world mystery from any curious inquiry. Most of the revolutions were like a feather, adding a tinge of ink to the myriad history of the art market and then floating elsewhere to make changes.
Why are collectors and gallerists so reluctant to share their records? Why are there so many failed projects that aimed high but ended up wretched? Why are even auction records born in public spectacles kept only partially accessible to the general public unless paid for? Why are online art platforms like Artsy still have very few galleries that reveal the prices of their artworks? What is after all so sensitive behind all these walls?
Blockchain technology thrusts our contemporary innovators to reject any gloomy assumption. On blockchain, everything is recorded permanently, kept safe, irreversible, and publicly accessible.
Some go for a direct shot. Verisart is one, an early pioneer in enabling owners of artwork to verify their art on the blockchain. Ascribe takes a similar approach to make the provenance retrievable through a digital ID. Codex Protocol, offering a safe store for art and collectibles, has made its voice heard among collectors.
We can get our fingers crossed for a revolution led by collectors and experienced practitioners, yet people might still wonder how such projects differ from previous attempts, or more generically, what role blockchain technology plays in solving the problem when owners of art are already willing to contribute their data.
Crowd-funding is another way. Maecenas, “the decentralized art gallery,” attempts to approach the sensitive issues by envisioning fractional ownership for the art and thus propose an art investment “in the most transparent and efficient way.” Through this method, people have to give out their provenance and market prices since the record is in itself public.
Online auction and fractional transaction, however, are no news. That’s probably why FRESCO and Artolin probe into the more profound incentive behind and hope to wage a revolution against these immoral centralization and opaqueness.
Artolin, an online stock-exchange platform for art, based on “measuring artwork acceptance in the market.” In their system, the market acts as a fundamental drive in determining the value of art and promoting the work of the highest quality.
Instead of targeting at the generally acknowledged problems, FRESCO aims to invigorate the change from the inside, by creating an invigorated ecosystem through the combination of FRES Trust and FRES Edition.
FRES Edition is a system for the owner of an artwork to issue multiple editions of blockchain certificates. Each FRES Edition holder can gain profits from the appreciation of that edition when the FRES Trust of the original artwork increases.
FRES Edition allows editions owners to actively promote the artwork and benefit from it directly. Each addition of FRES Cash to the artwork goes to its FRES Trust value. The value of each FRES Edition will simultaneously increase at the dividend amount.
In this way, owners of artwork are willing to upload their work under the incentive of efficient liquidation and promotion, and simultaneously build up a reliable network of provenance.
At the same time, FRESCO avoids associating the trust value with an explicit price tag. The FRES trust — an invented concept to demonstrate how much the market trusts the potential value of art — only shows the market acceptance while avoiding “going against the basic algorithm of the art industry.” FRES Trust encourages users to create an efficient and intuitive art ecosystem, where users have the incentive to engage and contribute, thereby generating a comprehensive system of digital provenance and solving other problems.
One aims at the power of the market; the other dissects into the fundamental mechanism. To what extent will Artolin and FRESCO undermine the current problems is yet to be seen, at least the stakes being high.
About FRESCO
FRESCO is the world’s first blockchain art asset network.
Through blockchain technology, FRESCO enables liquidation, promotion, and provenance of artworks at a global scale.
FRESCO token holders have the priority to allocate their FRESCO tokens (FRES Cash) to artworks on FRESCO platform. The amount of FRES Cash equals the sum of trust value (FRES Trust) they can distribute to the artwork.
The FRESCO Operations and Advisory Teams include leading figures in the global art scene, the blockchain industry, and financial realm. Our engineering team has extensive experience in developing blockchain projects. The FRESCO team will release our testing network, FRESCO Alpha Net Version One (FANVO), among the world’s mega-galleries, museums, and private collectors within nine months. Collaborations at this scope will enrich the FRESCO database and facilitate the art trust tokenization.
Whitepaper: http://fresco.work/whitepaper/
Explainer Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TumCob7-g5I&t=1s
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