Blockchain has secured a decent place in various sectors, including payments, finance, and supply chain management, among others. But how it can change art – an industry that is based on tradition?
How Can ArtPro Clean Up the Art Industry?
The statistics show that about 30% of all artworks sold in the market are fakes or forgeries. For those unfamiliar, they are two different things. Noah Charney, founder of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art, explained:
“A fake is a pre-existing work of art that has been altered in some way to fraudulently increase its value. A forgery is a new work created wholesale from scratch in fraudulent imitation of something else or the style of another artist.”
Last year, French police discovered that out of the 142 pieces at the Museé Terrus in Elne, 82 were not real works painted by Étienne Terrus.
The bad news is that The Terrus museum is not an isolated case. In the last 15 years, the FBI Art Crime Team has recovered over 15,000 works valued at more than $800 million. Some statistics say that about 20% of artworks in major museums might be fake, though other experts dispute the figure.
Leaving the figures aside, forgery is a real challenge for the art market, valued at almost $64 billion as of 2017. Estonia-based ArtPro is a blockchain-oriented startup that wants to address these issues by leveraging the distributed ledger technology.
In 2017 Deloitte found out that art professionals agreed that “authenticity, lack of provenance, forgery, and attribution [are] the greatest threat to the reputation of the art market.”
ArtPro is a peer-to-peer art marketplace that connects buyers and sellers. It relies on a verification system that makes sure each artwork on sale is authentic.
ArtPro’s Blockchain-Based Provenance Solution
ArtPro’s website and dApp revolve around a tamper-proof provenance solution stored on the blockchain. This approach allows art buyers and sellers to easily check whether the artworks in their hands are original. The provenance refers to the record of documentation that includes the origin, ownership, and authenticity of a painting.
Since blockchain is immutable and transparent, it is the ideal technology to help market participants filter our forgeries.
ArtPro claims to offer the world’s first peer-to-peer marketplace for art. The platform targets artists, buyers, collectors and art lovers in general. Last month, Estonia’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) gave its nod for ArtPro’s crowd-sale.
Do you think ArtPro’s blockchain-based platform can stops forgeries in the art market? Share your opinion in the comments section!
Images via Shutterstock