L. S. Lowry and the solution to design fraud in the modern age.
Over the celebrated life of L. S. Lowry, he produced poignant works that mainly focused on the industrial districts of North West England. He transformed these bustling working towns into important snapshots of industrial change. He elevated the life of ordinary people to real art and reveled in their subtle complexity. Since his death in 1976, these paintings have become coveted talismans of 21st-century English life — their material value skyrocketing. So much so that in 2013, a heist took place at the Grove Fine Art Gallery, Stockport, that lost five Lowry works. The estimated value of these exceeding 2 million pounds. The works were later found abandoned in a house near Halewood in Liverpool. It was assumed the criminals determined that due to their iconic status, they would be far too dangerous ever to sell.
The desire for his work is so great that people will do whatever they can to join the exclusive circle of connoisseurs who own his work. Lowry’s work has been forged as early as 1970 -and he is considered to be one of the most often faked British artists in history. His simple art style made him a soft target for forging, and the drama and desire around his work made people easily exploitable when it came to parting with their money to acquire his legendary work. Some experts even going as far as to estimate 40% of fine art is fake and accounts for billions of dollars of sales each year.
In 2015 Steve Ames sought the help of a panel of experts to try and confirm the authenticity of three works, Lady with dogs, Darby and Joan, and Crowd Scene purportedly painted by L.S. Lowry that he had inherited from his late father. These paintings had a variety of issues. First of all, none of them had documents proving their provenance, and only one had labels from The Ferve Gallery, who often sold Lowrys’ works. The famous painter had also boasted about using only five colors in his paintings. These were Flake (lead) White, Scarlet Vermillion, Prussian Blue, Yellow Ochre, and Ivory Black — always from the Windsor and Newton company. A quick sample analysis of these pictures confirmed that these exact colors were used for Lady with Dogs, and Crowd Scene, however, the white used in Darby and Joan was not a lead-based white, but a zinc-based one. This created a tremendous amount of doubt around the verisimilitude of these works.
To authenticate these paintings, a team of experts compared the frames, the auction numbers, the art style, the ledgers of auction houses, reels of old film showing the inside of the artists’ studio, x-ray scanning technology, brushstroke analysis, high-resolution photo imaging, and insurance documents to try and find their true origins.
After much investigation and deliberation, the committee of experts confirmed that the works appeared to be original L.S. Lowry paintings indeed. Their value transforming from being a few measly hundred pounds to worth almost half a million pounds.
This is not an original story, either. Forgeries have existed for almost all famous artists, including Basquiat, Kandinsky, Van Gogh, Modigliani, Miró, Vermeer, Michelangelo, Gauguin, and even modern artists like Banksy are regularly imitated for fame or fortune.
The amount of work that goes into being able to prove who is the original artist behind a work is phenomenal for physical art. But what hope does the digital world have? Some of today’s most famous creative works are done solely on computers and leave little to no traces of their creation. These digital works are then posted online to be sold or appreciated, and in a heartbeat can be copied and replicated countless times in a way that would make Andy Warhol spin in his grave (which is viewable right now via live stream: www.warhol.org/andy-warhols-life/figment).
Digital artists compete in a market saturated with artists passing off the work of others as their own and receiving un-earned likes and shares. While often the currency of up-votes and hearts has no apparent financial implication, it strips artists of their well deserved appreciation and exposure. This adoration and brand awareness builds a following who may wish to donate or buy works from the artist. This following tells companies and organizations that these people are viable candidates for commissions or sponsorships. In short, the buzz around the artist gains momentum and contributes significantly to their success, so the harm in faked work is greatly underestimated.
But with the potential for so many people vying to claim works as theirs in the various corners of the digital world, how can we ever be sure? Ugly watermarks have been plastered across images, embedded lines of code, and slightly cropped images have had various degrees of success determining who the creator was — however, they are ugly, awkward, and uncompelling arguments to make.
ProvenDB is a front runner in harnessing the fantastic potential of the Blockchain to label intellectual property as your own irrevocably. This means that whether you are a digital artist, a scriptwriter, poet, graphic designer, or photographer, you can ensure your work is proven to be your own. The ProvenDB team believes that the power of the Blockchain is so great it will even change the way legal documents are shared and verified.
But what is the Blockchain, and how does it work? The Blockchain is a technology associated mainly with Bitcoin. Essentially it is a public list of entries that cannot be undone. When you save something to the Blockchain, it is there in perpetuity. Still, ProvenDB will allow you to amend your documents by creating a further version of it and also link the uploaded item to yourself, so no one else can legitimately take credit for your creation. The Blockchain is enormous, so while it is a public register, the odds of being able to find a sought after item without the address to reach it is less likely than two people sharing a fingerprint.
ProvenDB will give you the address to find your upload on the Blockchain in the event you need to prove, beyond doubt, that the work is your own. Applications using Blockchain are only just being fully realized, and ProvenDB is a trailblazer ushering in a golden age of respect for intellectual property. Working with legal professionals, artists, developers, and businesses, the intent is to create databasing solutions that work for a vast spectrum of requirements, including keeping the things you made, your own.
So feel free to create and share in the knowledge that ProvenDB will use the Blockchain to protect your creative rights. ProvenDB is here to ensure your genius is recognized. Defenders of the all that is good and true they strive valiantly to create technological solutions to technical problems! As for galleries and museums wanting to prevent criminals from stealing their priceless works of art off the walls… we will leave that up to Batman.
Keep an eye out for the upcoming film: ‘Mrs Lowry & Son’ staring Timothy Spall as L. S. Lowry.
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ProvenDB integrates MongoDB with the Bitcoin Blockchain. Immutable versions of database state are anchored to the Blockchain, delivering an unparalleled level of data integrity. ProvenDB allows MongoDB developers to build high-performance applications that include cryptographic proof of data integrity and provenance without having to understand blockchain programming complexities.
