I am starting a new series called food for thought. Here, I will be collecting random ideas I have for WeeeArt and the general scope of digital ownership. Are these ideas finalized? Nope. Are they any good? Probably not.
One of the biggest goals with WeeeArt is to create true value in owning digital artworks. Instead of simply focusing on using blockchain as a means of tracking provenance, we wanted their to be intrinsic value in owning the token. To reach our goal, we employed a utility driven design model to owning a token.
WeeeArt delivers on this goal with the rendering engine; owners can enjoy their artworks by requesting higher detailed renders for different uses. WeeeArt seeks to provide owners an unique right to enjoy their artworks in a way that they can only access.
But, art is meant to be shown right?
Sneaking into private galleries, spending a day at art museums, or showing off your private collection are unique parts of the experience of owning a physical artwork. Enjoying artwork, for many, is a social experience.
The challenge from the beginning for WeeeArt was how we can create the digital equivalent of owning physical artworks. I have always wanted to find a way to make owning a WeeeArt artwork have a social experience component.
But this arises a unique set of problems: trust and lack thereof. Let just say WeeeArt releases a new feature for owners to create a private gallery event for select viewers to view the owners artworks. Since all users already have access to the 720px rendered variant of any artwork (publicly distributed), hosting a private gallery means that the owner is releasing higher resolution renders of their artworks to the viewers.
If this doesn’t make any sense, I suggest reading my previous piece on owning digital artwork.
https://medium.com/weeeart/on-owning-digital-artwork-7e9f1a6058c4
A problem arises for the owner of the WeeeArt artworks. He is freely distributing higher resolution artworks to everybody! In real life, inviting a friend to view your private collection of artworks is not an invitation to take the artworks right off the wall and leave. Unfortunately, because of how digital images operate, anybody who can view the higher resolution artwork can also download it and redistribute it to their hearts content.
Therefore, digital artworks shown in any form of a gallery event is an open invitation to steal the artworks’ detailed renders. Artworks will soon have no value, and no owner would want to share their artworks.
This seems to be an unsolvable problem, but in the spirit of half-assing a solution, I present you an interesting design to create private gallery events possible with WeeeArt digital artworks.
In one word: staking.
The key problem of a singular owner sharing their private gallery is that the owner incurs all the costs of showing the higher resolution renders. To an owner, it is a lose-win situation. He/she will devalue their artworks while everybody gets to enjoy his/her artwork at higher resolutions at no cost.
I present to you a few hypothetical models. Ranging from the simplest to the hardest. I will precede the conversation with a warning. These are incomplete thoughts and I have not ventured into every corner case. More so, they are open minded thoughts for later refinement and further discussion.
- Everybody loses a little
The idea goes: can we distribute the artwork value depreciation cost in different ways? Can we spread the costs of sharing high resolution renders from one singular owner to many participants?
A gallery doesn’t have to have a single owner giving up high resolution renders of their workers. What if each participant in a gallery viewing are equivalent? Everybody is a viewer and an artwork presenter.
In a way you can think of it as an exclusive club of sorts. One can only join and reap the benefits of an organization by staking something valuable.
The stakes acts as an anchor, a conscience weight on the user/node that they should behave in such a way to retrieve said stake back or get the maximum benefit from participating in the organization.
In this case, each gallery participant needs to give up an artwork to the pool. With some governance system from within the group, the artwork “surrendered” is determined if it is worthy as a stake to join the gallery showing. Each participant now have a incentive to behave better. Not to say this will stop participants from downloading the render, at least in this situation each participant takes a hit from sharing a high resolution render to other people.
In effect, this doesn’t resolve the cost owners pay for distributing a high resolution render of their artwork. Instead, it diffuses it to every participant of a gallery showing. Does getting to see other people artworks outweigh the value of your own artworks?
To this statement, this model is an incomplete but possible direction of further thought.
2. Transplant to the physical
Why don’t we simply go around the problem of digital distribution by having the gallery physically exist? In a way, this is part of the long term vision of WeeeArt. I hope to create a system to produce anti-fraud physical renderings of owners’ artworks that they can buy. In this case, owners own a physical copy of their artworks and now are empowered with the features of physical ownership to stop artwork devaluation.
While WeeeArt currently doesn’t have any official system to provide authentic physical renderings of your artwork backed by WeeeArt and blockchain provenance, we actively promote owners to print their own renders out! Owners today can simply print their renders at a high resolution with a quality printer and paper. Hang them on the wall, and walla! A gallery in the real world. We will be writing a piece on getting WeeeArt artworks into the real world later.
I’m going to stop here, because while this does solve the problem of creating a social experience with enjoying art, it feels kind of like a cheat.
3. Gallery with trusted viewers and owners.
The big problem with public distribution of a rendered image is the lack of trust an owner can have to the intent of the viewer. What if this trust can be established? Either through a reputation/credit system, or a broker, some form of a economy for trusted owners and viewers can exist. Owners may share high resolution renders of their artwork only to trusted viewers knowing with slightly better certainty that the viewers will not redistribute the render.
Building a economy of trust, especially with nameless addresses in the blockchain world remains to be a difficult task. Unlike the credit score or professional reputation, a “blockchain” reputation today may not have the gravity to enforce honest behavior. What if somebody throws away years of their “blockchain reputation” and acts rogue? The consequences in burning one’s “blockchain” reputation are trivial. They can simply get a new address and start anew.
Another idea extends to possibly introducing a new role into the WeeeArt economy: the moderator. Kind of like a official reviewing the food safety of a restaurant, these art critics can act as moderators of an artist community. They can work on behalf of the owners community to operate a community of honest viewers. (However means necessary through forms of staking or governance) Owners can then “buy” the service of an moderator to find the right community of viewers to introduce their private gallery to. This can potentially create an incentive structures for community development within the WeeeArt economy.
These problems will need to work and ideation of the industry; WeeeArt hopes to try some experiments with a reputation system, but we hold some reserves about its actual effectiveness today.
Enjoying art can be both a social and private act. To provide a safe mean for only owners to enjoy their WeeeArt artworks seems incomplete; it is a challenge to create a social experience for digital art that doesn’t depreciate the value of the artwork for the owners. How do we make viewers and owners behave honestly?
I will make the point that this piece overlooks the incentives of why an owner today on WeeeArt may want to share a higher rendered version of their artwork in any digital gallery beyond a charitable motivation. Can private gallery viewers charge admission? Use it as a marketing system to sell/buy artworks? To interact/network with other art specialist? Simply to enjoy the experience of the artworks in their full potential with others? What if owners of WeeeArt artworks simply don’t want to share their artworks.
Hence, this piece is labeled as a food for thought. WeeeArt may never implement any of the above features or use them all. It is all up to what the owners within the WeeeArt community wants.
-David Sun
