Artwork Authenticity
Following are my remarks to those attending the Ong Kim Seng Artwork Showcase held on Sat 25 June 2020 at Singapore’s The Arts House Gallery II in the historic Old Parliament Building.
In the next few minutes I will explain how art is protected by digital certificates. I will explain why this is important for contemporary artists working in physical media as well as for the new generation of digital artists. Finally I will explain some of the buzz words including NFTs and tokenisation.
Our company NextID is two years old and is focused on producing verifiable digital certificates. These machine-readable documents have some special features which make them suitable for issuance of academic degrees, health status and for artwork authenticity. The most important feature is that they can be independently verified.
To give a single example, employers no longer need to call an applicant’s university to verify if a particular degree was issued to the applicant. Instead, a relying party such as an employer can simply upload the digital certificate to a verification service and confirm who issued the cert, when it was issued, to whom it was issued and what is attested or claimed by the issuer. Verification also proves that the document wasn’t tampered with, revoked or expired.
This is all made possible because the document contains cryptographic proofs that have been anchored to a blockchain. We call such a document a Verifiable Credential and it follows an international standard issued by the same body that has defined our internet protocols. In Singapore, OpenCerts and Health Certs are examples of such a document.
When we use the Verifiable Credential format to certify the authenticity of a work of art, we capture very specific information about the artwork. The certificate issuer or copyright owner will upload to our service a high-resolution image of the artwork, a digitised version of the artist’s signature, and a set of metadata that describes the work. The images are then encoded in a way that they are compressed and stored within the certificate data.
Our service also creates a very specific string of text, known as a hash. This is a digest of the artwork image, like a genetic sample, and no two digital files will have the same image hash unless they are identical. If we were to change any part of the original high resolution image, it would generate a completely different image hash.
By placing this image hash — the genetic sample — into the certificate, we provide a means for relying parties to compare any work of art against the one which we have certified as authentic. Suppose that someone copies the original copyrighted work and tries to pass it off as the original, the artwork can be immediately determined to be a fraud. On the other hand, if someone presents a certificate which was not produced by the copyright holder, and it does not include their usual digital signature, this can prove that the artist never issued such a certificate and therefore it is a fraud.
The image hash can also be applied in ink on the back of a physical artwork. This brings the same certificate of authenticity protection to tangible original art on canvases or other physical media, even prints. The image hash can permanently link the tangible original to the high resolution image and the certificate of authenticity which is verifiably correct. This protects the artist’s copyrights.
It used to be the case that artists were reluctant to circulate high resolution images of their work, even for promotional purposes, because they could be misused by unscrupulous copy cats. But now the high resolution images can be protected and this opens up a whole new — and global — digital art market.
In the past few years, we have witnessed how digital art has been tokenised in the form of Non Fungible Tokens or NFTs. No doubt, some folks have been exploiting the growing interest in NFTs by releasing a series of generative works at ever-higher prices. I don’t consider that art — it’s marketing which targets the crypto wealthy who have little else to spend their bitcoin and ethereum on.
But there is still something useful happening here. It is the transformation of digital works into tokens, which can be traded, but which — like cryptocurrency, cannot be double-spent. With digital art, if I send you a copy, I still keep my own copy. But with tokens, when I send it to you, I no longer have it. This is an important change in art commerce.
NFTs are tradeable deeds for a collection of rights granted by the copyright holder, typically limited to non-commercial exhibition rights. The token could also entitle the holder to receive an original physical work, or include rights to create derivative works such as coffee mugs and T-shirts. And there is another unique feature of tokens — payment of royalties to the copyright holder, enforced by a smart contract. Never before have royalties been able to be automated so that artists participate in future sales of their work.
There is one thing that NFTs don’t do well. They do not contain an image hash or the artist’s digital signature, so they do not provide a good certificate of authenticity. This is an important distinction. Artists should produce a certificate of authenticity for all their works and then selectively consider tokenisation of the most valuable works.
Thank you for your attention ladies and gentlemen. And thank you to Vaultv for giving me the opportunity to share my remarks with you this evening.
By Bill Claxton, founder & CEO of NextID
Please also visit VaultV to learn more.
