You describe yourself as a ““post-post-modernist” painter of truth, exploring the psychological and spiritual toll of some of the most pressing social, economic, and political issues in our society.” where do you find inspiration?

I paint about today's society, our daily lives, the positive and the negative. I find an endless flow of inspiration from reading and watching the news, meeting people, traveling, observing our environment, globalization, greed, war, pandemic, civil unrest, immigration, religions, families, schooling and infrastructure. I also think there is a lot to learn from history and I try to combine news of different political persuasions through international media. In our ever-accelerating media cycle, we process vast amounts of textual information daily, but often it is an iconic image that endures.

Could you discuss some of your recent projects, and how current global issues influence them?

My paintings explore both our emotional entanglements with current events and the space these images hold in how we collectively understand them. I draw my inspiration from my previous career in music, reflected in the use of layered density of color and composition. I work to keep a constant feeling of alienation in my paintings, which in tandem with my color palette connects to a long history of a gloomy and mysterious aesthetic from the Northern Hemisphere.

Like my series from 2016,  "Aliens With Extraordinary Abilities" Aliens with extraordinary abilities is a series about refugees and immigration. Immigration has always been going on throughout history. The rise of ultra right wing parties all over Europe due immigration the last 10-15 years is in my opinion very dangerous and we need to work hard to find a way to hopefully get rid of religions and the ultra right wing parties from our societies.

In your artworks, especially in the series “Social Life”, you represent the society of today, always connected, always with a smartphone. What are in your opinion the positive and negative aspects of a society always connected?

The question is if we are more lonely today even though we are connected through the internet. I do prefer real life meetings over a nice dinner and good wine with friends and strangers. Social Media to me is primarily a marketing tool. Thanks to social media we have thousands of friends, we are globally interconnected, but the truth is that our social life is an illusion. This all-time-availability is turning us into zombies. Just look at the subway, the restaurants, in the elevator: everyone is possessed looking at their smartphones.

Do you think art and technology are influenced by each other? How?

Nowadays art and technology are working hand in hand, they are influencing each other, you can clearly see it in the new generation of artists working more and more with virtual reality

I always appreciated the work of artists such as Corey Arcangel, I love the way he combines art and technology. He is also using music references in his work and since my background is from the music I appreciate his work even more.

Do you think the new service provided by Arteïa, the “Digital Catalogue Raisonné for artists” is a useful tool for artists?

Yes it will be very useful, today we are all trying to save time and a digital catalogue is a great tool to get things organised better, and to allow more interaction with my work.

I can easily categorize and organize my artworks, following the market value of my art, where they are located around the world, and the platform is very user friendly.

Tell us a little bit about your experience using Arteia  to manage your studio. What is the value for artists to catalog their artworks and keep track of production ?

Proper management of my studio is so important, I need to keep track of where pieces are located, if they are available or have been sold, and to keep track of price levels.

It is important to stay organised because without being in control it is easy to forget or even lose artworks, Arteia is saving me money and time on the administrative work that my assistant is doing for me.

Are you optimistic about 2022 ?

Yes I am a natural born optimist and I am very much looking forward to 2022, even though it will still be influenced by Covid.  We have to see it as a learning experience.

Creating art is helping me to cope with the pandemic, I believe that Online shows and sales will be more and more important, the pandemic has opened the eyes for many players in the art world who were more skeptical of the online market prior to the pandemic.

Patrizia, could you tell us a little bit about your art background, and how you initially became involved in contemporary art?

After I graduated in Economics and Commerce, I worked in my father's company and started tocapproach contemporary art as a collector in the early 90’s. My journey in London, in 1992, played a fundamental role in my involvement with contemporary art. I visited many museums and galleries, above all I started to get to know the artists, to visit their studios and to establish an authentic relationship with many of them. Meeting these artists opened up a new world for me.

How did your background in collecting influence your interest in the formation of the foundation?

I had the privilege to meet many gallerists, museum directors and curators but most of all artists; and I had the chance to talk with them about their works. This was a great gift that I immediately wanted to share somehow with others. So, I decided that I would become more active in the contemporary art world. The desire to support young artists, to share my Collection and to bring an ever- growing public closer to contemporary art led me to establish the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 1995. The Fondazione is a nonprofit institution which has two exhibition venues: Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, an old family villa, in Guarene only 40 km from Torino and the Fondazione’s headquarters in Turin.

Could you tell us a bit about your collecting practice, what kind of art are you interested in and why?

My Collection started as a "generational" collection. It grew out of my friendships with artists of my same age and these days I also support and work with the young generation of artists from, more or less, the same age of my sons: a new generation. I can say that I never bought names but works. It was never with the aim of decorating my home. I only buy works that give me strong emotions. Works that are able to capture the present, and to anticipate the future.

What are the main goals for the foundation?

The Fondazione has three main aims, the first one is to support and promote artists through commission, production, and exhibition of new works. The second is to educate and widen access to contemporary art and the last one is to create partnerships with national and international institutions (from Museo Egizio in Turin, Whitechapel Gallery in London to Contemporary Art Museum of Quito and to Rockbund Art Musem in Shanghai...).

What are your thoughts on the role of technology in collecting, and in arts foundations?

My approach to commissioning, acquiring, and exhibiting contemporary art has always included new technology. The digital is now everywhere, and if you employ the word in a broad sense, today most art is produced thanks to the technology. Not to mention the importance of the internet for any artist working today.

For this purpose, a few years ago, the Fondazione started a great collaboration between the Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media. Every two years we invite and commission a new work by an artist working with different medium such as film, video, sounds and performance. The objective of this co-commissioning and co- acquisitioning project is to encourage the artist and the creation of mediums linked to technology which might be hard to collect and preserve for a private collector.

How does art play a role in trying to educate audiences?

Since the beginning, I deeply believe that understanding the arts is a vital component of every person’s education and development. For this reason, one of the main aims of the Fondazione is to educate and widen access to contemporary art. Our Education Department organises and implements activities that are dedicated to schools, young people, adults, teachers, families, and people with disabilities (deaf, blind, etc...). Over the years, this dialogue with students,
teachers, managers of schools, and institutions in our area, has led to the creation of numerous experimental programmes; the result of intense collective experiences of planning. Every year we welcome more than 25 thousand students at the Fondazione.

How has Arteïa helped in managing the foundation’s art collection and which feature do you find most useful?

Arteïa is the first collection management platform that I have begun using and that we are using in Fondazione. This online database is a great way to keep my Collection under control. I really appreciate the different functionalities that the platform offers. I particularly like the possibility to include documents in the artwork’s sheets. In a unique page you can find different kind of information about the works and you can share them with your contacts by selecting the specific details you want to send.

Would you recommend Arteïa to other art foundations and collections?

I would surely recommend Arteïa to every collector, or cultural institution which have to deal with artwork, and which need to follow the thread of their collections. Arteïa particularly helps the dynamic collections which always have works loaned all around the world. And it can also be a very precious tool for archival and conservation purposes. This platform is very intuitive, easy to use and allows every user to create very detailed documents on each artwork, artist, and contacts.

How has COVID affected the foundation and its projects?

During this period, the doors of the Fondazione have been closed but we stayed virtually open. Obviously, the schedule of the Fondazione has been changed due to the lockdown period but also due to the sanitary measures we must now respect. However, we continued to create new projects and we adapted our approach to the different audiences creating more digital content especially for schools and children.

For example, we have started making digital commissions that we published on our website - this is not something we have never done before. On our website we implemented a brand-new section on which we show digital artworks from ad hoc commissions for this web platform.

What are some of the foundation’s future goals for this year and beyond?

In the next years, our ambitions for the foundation are to continue to support artists materially and financially by commissioning and producing new works. Also, to maintain our efforts to educate and widen access to contemporary art by focusing our attention on art mediation, education, and training through our two programmes: the Young Curators Residency Programme and the CAMPO course for Italian curators.

For the future, next to Turin, I have two places in my heart: Madrid and a vineyard in the Roero hills in Piemonte. The next goal is to give a home to the Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid, born in 2017. The second project is the San Licerio’s Sculpture Park, in Guarene, not far from Palazzo Re Rebaudengo. Every year we commission one of the most promising young artists on the international scene to create a large-scale sculpture, which is installed on the hill, free to visit all year round.

This Sculpture Park is our contribution to the wonderful landscape of the Langhe-Roero, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. These selected public works aim to explore and reflect upon the delicate relationship between nature and culture.

Hélène Delprat © Philippe Bonan

« The digital catalogue raisonné is a way to make links between works and to show where they come from »

In the life of an artist, a catalogue raisonné is an event, as if you were published in the Pléiade...

The important thing for me is what happens day after day in my studio. But it is also the understanding of my work, today and tomorrow. When I was thirty years old, the Maeght gallery offered me to do a monograph, I refused because I was afraid that it would push me towards the grave.

Today, I feel the need to give coherence to my work. The catalogue raisonné, obviously flattering, offers above all the opportunity to look back on forty years of films, paintings, photos and drawings.

Thanks to the blockchain anchor, no one will be able to amputate your work, or add to it, either during your lifetime or after. Does this reassure you?

I would probably like to know that my work deserves the attention of a great forger! But while waiting for such a big name to get serious about it, I tell myself that I am not the worst person to give a reading to all this. The digital catalogue raisonné is a way to make links between works and to show where they come from.

Have you decided to catalogue all your works, or only, to use your words, those you don't "hate"?

The catalogue raisonné is a collective work. It will be the fruit of in-depth exchanges with Christophe Gaillard, who carries the gallery's project with his team. On a personal level, my favourite things are my films, but in this catalogue all my work will be brought together. The interest is the exhaustiveness that allows us to cover all the periods. Not everything is equally exciting, but what is exciting is the whole.

Not everything is equally exciting, but what is exciting is the whole.

To what new use as an artist could the digital tool lend itself, in your opinion?

I dream of showing people around behind the scenes. Going back to the early years, especially my stay at the Villa Medici in Rome, is first of all a pleasure, to be 20 years old again! Looking back on the period during which I curled up in my shell, compared to what followed, is more trying. That said, this look in the rear-view mirror has the merit of bringing out, I believe, a coherence in the contradictions.

From the digital catalogue raisonné, I imagine associating hypertext links to each referenced piece. In such a painting, such a motif comes from such an old work of art that had marked me, and is still found elsewhere; such a subject was inspired by a news item discovered in an article that I have kept.

This whole body of work, reported accurately and properly, would help researchers, institutions or collectors to understand my approach.

Hélène Delprat (born 1957) lives and works in Paris. She has been teaching drawing at the Beaux-Arts de Paris since 2014 and has been a studio head since October 2019. She was a resident at the prestigious Villa Medici in Rome from 1982 to 1984. In the last 5 years, Delprat has had a solo exhibition at carlier I gebauer gallery, Berlin (DE) - September 2018; Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris (FR) - September 2017; Musée des Beaux Arts de Caen (FR) - March 2018, La maison rouge, Paris (FR) - June 2017. She also participated in the group exhibition "Mask" at Kunsthaus Aargauer,Aarau (CH) - August 2019. Her work has already been exhibited, among others, at the Gustave Moreau Museum, the Jeu de Paume or the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris, for the Hors Pistes Festival.

What is your background in art?

I came to art via design initially. After studying furniture and product design in Copenhagen and art history at CSM, I realised I was really interested in exploring the nexus of creativity and commerce. This was put into practice quickly, when I moved to NYC after graduation, where I organically rolled into the art scene. This was during one of the great art boom’s, and I was soon helping friends navigate the art market and organise their collections. This made me highly aware of how important it is not to just invest in culture, but also to actively engage with it after purchase. At this point, I started my business in art advising and collection-management. To continuously further my expertise, I kept doing various educational degrees in art and art history along the way.

What is Blaasmo Art Advisory and what is your role?

Blaasmo Art Advisory, is an art advisory and collection management service that helps private individuals and corporations navigate the art market. We help them with everything from sourcing works to maintaining their collections. I am the sole director.

What do you like the most about your job ?

What I like most about my job and the art business is the people. People drive me and art world is full of fascinating people with loads of stories to tell. I also really enjoy being the middle man; fulfilling the role of reformulating raw creativity into something that people can understand, support and take part in.

Could you describe an experience that you’ve had in the art world that defines your role?

One of my favourite projects was a client finding an entire basement of art works that hadn’t been touched since the 60s. We found the most incredible art works, international and Norwegian; works on paper as well as oil canvasses. Dealing with this, from beginning to end was one of the most exciting projects of my career, and very role defining. I could apply all my skills, from accessing and valuing the works to truly caring for and honouring the pieces by providing them state of the art storage and finding appropriate exhibition space for them in museums around the world.

Can you tell us about your experience working both in London and Norway ?

I think being based in an art hub like London, New York City or Shanghai gave me a greater understanding and access to the International art market. It is an exciting and inspiring place to be based. In Scandinavia, I find I apply local knowledge, as well as my international expertise, which works particularly well for my Scandinavian clients, who are often interested in gaining access to the international market, but do require a more local approach. I am not just their ticket, I am also their translator to some extent, allowing for a smoother experience between the different worlds. Of course everyone is different, so wherever I operate, I  personalise the experience for the specific client.

What artists inspire you the most at the moment ?

I don’t have professional favourites. It is never about one specific work or artist for me, but about greater movements within the art world. Right now I am inspired by the way the market responds to Art after the coronavirus. After some very insular months, it is time to re-open our horizons.

How do you reconcile the type of art you personally gravitate towards and your clients’ taste?

Frankly, I do not wear my personal taste hat at all in my work. I believe strongly that the success in helping my clients is to understand what they want. Much like a branding exercise, I find out together with the client what their story is, and how they want to communicate this through their art purchases. My role is to find the art works that allow my clients to express their own vision.

Why is the role of an art advisor important?

You get a more holistic experience of the art world and art works. Philosophically, having a second opinion and someone who can question your thoughts, hugely helps in creating a more defined and stronger view point. Logistically, an art advisor is helpful for securing a wealth management plan, and making sure your artworks are future-proof in value and care.

Could you talk a bit about how technology plays a role in your work?

Technology is key for me in matters of communication. Technology helps me simplify the conversation between the creative process and the business side.

What are, in your mind, the evolution of art advisory services with technology ?

I am torn about how we currently experience art online. Selling actual art via a PDF feels hollow to me, to some extent. But I am open and excited to explore the opportunities that technology can bring us in fully experiencing art digitally.

Have you ever bought an artwork online for a client ?

Yes, and in particular during the Covid19 period there has been a huge wave towards online auctions. Buying online became the new normal, overnight. It is exciting because it pushed the art world to embrace technology. They had to go 360 in a very short period of time, to ensure the online experience would feel on par with an offline experience, in representing works.

What is Arteïa’s most useful feature for you ?

The day-to-day streamlined easy access management tools. They give me and my clients control at all times. Knowing what is available and being fully aware of all the content is incredibly practical and reassuring. The custom made financial reports are a great resource in particular.

Why is it important to start cataloguing a collection early on?

It is simply a much bigger more energy consuming job when it has to be done later on. It is also more exciting to catalogue a work at time of purchase, giving it more gravitas. In general I think cataloguing allows us to honour the works we have more, because it does not just exist on your wall or in your mind, it is captured as part of a greater story.

Could you talk about how technology will play a role in the future of the art market?

We have seen a dramatic change during Covid19, that could give us some insights. Everyone in the art world has had to change their ways, perhaps quicker than they would have otherwise, in order to keep business going and ensure creativity and culture is supported. Technology has a big role to play in art reaching a wider demographic. Another role it will play is the introduction of greater transparency. Technology pushes archaic systems hugely in this matter. A major recent example is the direct visibility of prices. There is still a long way to go for technology to be able to replace the immersive experience off-line art viewing provides. I think virtual reality technology might be able to change that in the future, especially when it comes to purchasing art.

Do you work with emerging artists ?

I work with all aspects of the art market, and that includes emerging artists. I find it very exciting to be able to facilitate the start of a career, so I always encourage my clients to invest in emerging artists, as in investment or as a patron. I think it is hugely important to support new artists entering the market.

Could you talk a bit about the importance of building a network between collectors and artists?

Collectors need to understand the importance of their role in the market. There would be no artists without collectors. The eco-system requires both sides to engage with one another. It is essential for the market to flourish.

Blaasmo Art Advisory, founded by Truls Blaasmo, is an independent art advisory and collection management consultancy. With over 10 years experience in London, Shanghai, New York and Oslo, Truls helps clients to navigate the art market with his exceptional guidance, from general know-how and market access to all practical logistics concerning the procurement, curation, collecting and management of artworks.

In the two previous essays (Part 1, Part 2), we explored themes revolving around the asymmetric ecosystem of art and forming of the Art Identification Standard to address some of its looming challenges. Information asymmetry is certainly a tough nut to crack, especially considering the ever-changing dynamics of the modern art market and its riveting business actors. In the digital age of today the data is everywhere, and so is data pollution, which when left unattended, slows the progress of companies that rely on efficient data economies and makes it harder for everyone to derive value from available information.

Creating digital representations of art objects to a global system that acts as an independently verifiable, immutable source of truth opens the possibilities of non-zero-sum game business models, where companies that usually compete with each other aim to expand the size of the art market (and increase profit margins) through collaboration and mutually beneficial goals. Often at the very core of organisational prowess lies a powerful technical solution that goes beyond the constraints of today with a set of ambitious goals to change tomorrow. Most progress rises from innovation or crisis. Today, we face both those triggers. The novelty in persisting art-related information in the digital space is rooted in a new way of thinking about identifiers for unique objects (or unique classes of objects), henceforth leveraging the very latest advances in information science.

Exploring universally unique identifiers

The world is random. Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Stepping back from trying to dissect what mathematics and philosophy are telling us about the reality we thrive in (and the art we cherish), randomness (or pseudorandomness, which is an inherent property of every Turing machine that does not rely on an external source of entropy) lies at the heart of every computing mechanism and technique that deals with processing information.

Working under an entry assumption that the global digital data repository for art objects should be as lightweight and as unobtrusive as possible to create and assign an id to the object, the first thing that comes to mind is a simple system tagging objects with one of the universally unique identifier variants that are ubiquitous across a raft  of programming languages and operating systems. UUID’s are of fixed 128-bit size, up to 36 characters long (up to 32 without dashes) and generated with just enough entropy (derived from hardware interrupts, mouse movements, disk activity or other sources) to lower the chance of collision (two objects sharing the same identifier) to a negligible amount, which generally remains true even in distributed computing. The only exception to this is mobile devices that are practically considered to be low trust hardware with their (pseudo) random capabilities being insecure and prone to attacks.

77120652-cca9-4c60-bacc-6a9c4628ff10

The disadvantages of using UUID in data stores are noticeable in plain sight: their size (and performance overhead that goes along with it), problematic ordering, records inserted at random due to the absence of sequentiality, cumbersome debugging, and a few more. Not short on imperfections, universally unique identifiers have been successfully used for decades in the vast majority of computer systems as a smallest atomic unit to map information, tag objects, or identify digital abstractions across multiple types of data stores. However, being not context-aware, UUIDs are highly dependent on the decisions of the system designer and business stakeholders, who leverage them to satisfy a very specific and narrowly defined set of requirements. While effective at representing data, they work within walled gardens of their pre-defined environments and are unable to carry the object context and model the actions that created them in the first place in a decentralised and independently verifiable way.

Pointing at silos

If one were to try today to create and assign a unique, global, digital identifier to Guernica (a magnificent, colorless painting by Pablo Picasso that depicts the tragedies of war and the unexpected loss of innocence) we would probably end up having a seemingly random set of alphanumeric characters ready to be used inside a database system. Unless we take additional steps and assign the freshly generated alphanumerics (or hashes) to a data entity that provides further context, we are not getting much value from creating the unique identifier itself. Taking these additional steps results in creating a multi-layered software to record and maintain art data, with a lot of (both internal and external) software dependencies in place. It is an unverified and non-publicly auditable source of truth to work with. If a company decides to build software that aims to act as a provenance database for Picasso artworks it will probably end up building yet another information silo, as indistinguishable and as unverifiable as the other silos available on the market. In more vibrant words, the provenance of a Picasso artwork is as good as the company that built the software to keep the data claims it to be. A Picasso painting originating from a single information silo and traversing along a value chain is interacting with multiple actors that have no means to independently verify its provenance or whereabouts. In case of sale, this requires an additional set of services and checks and adds considerable risk, cost and bureaucracy to the process. Information silos are also often subject to security breaches and information loss. Nowadays, a set of new, decentralised solutions is fiercely competing with this paradigm of the past, trying to give back the power of ownership over information to individuals.  

Thinking in NFTs (non-fungible tokens) - craze and limitations

Non-fungible tokens took the blockchain world by storm in 2017 beginning with a cryptophunk movement, which introduced digital assets as collectibles. Fungible means a thing that can be replaced by an equivalent, whereas the non-fungible token design requires uniqueness. Providing a standard for representing scarcity and persistence on the blockchain (in this case, ERC-721), NFTs quickly moved from representing digital collectibles to other objects such as tickets, contractual documents, or artworks. NFTs are designed from the ground to be manageable, ownable, and tradeable, providing a common interface to use for blockchain developers. They share, however, a certain set of features that make them less convincing to use in a generally accepted, more universal, and independent scenario.

Most successful and secure implementations of non-fungible digital assets are available on the Ethereum network, which is a type of public blockchain driven by a proof-of-work consensus algorithm. Ethereum works in favour of openness and decentralisation but is relying on public miners (or in the case of Ethereum 2.0, cryptocurrency stakers) to secure the state of the network. Using Ethereum to build anything but a prototype of a global art object repository carries the question of eventual consistency and brings the cost of ether (and its volatility) to the picture.

Beyond a set of attributes and functions to manage balance, ownership, and transfer, NFTs implementations contain metadata fields that allow the developers to include additional context to  the digital assets they create. These are simple mappings of NFT identifiers to metadata URIs residing somewhere in the public space. It makes NFTs dependent on public APIs and challenges the advantage of them residing on the blockchain, as any digital asset that oraclises itself (points to or depends on external context outside of the distributed ledger) violates the trust bestowed in the blockchain smart contract. An NFT representing Guernica would have its identifier (almost) always intact, but the external API that provides additional data can be easily replaced or simply switched off.

During the crypto kitties craze, the need for ERC-721 based non-fungible tokens depicting kittens jammed up the Ethereum network close to its theoretical capacity. ERC-721does not support batch transfers; whenever an action on the token is taken, it is processed in a separate transaction. Executing actions on 1,000 NFT tokens effectively results in 1000 isolated transactions being run on the Ethereum network. Ultimately, this makes working with NFTs difficult to scale and not very cost-effective for actors that own and manage them in large numbers. There are other NFT standards that blockchain developers consistently iterate on, attempting to address some of its shortcomings (including batch transfers), but at the moment none is as battle-proven and as widely used as the ERC-721. NFTs have found their niche notably in representing digital objects that have no physical counterparts. One of the most popular use cases, where non-fungible tokens are used in coherence with their design goals, is digital art. Afterall, NFT tokens are not a bad invention on their own, however, using them means compromising on the shortcomings they come with. Ultimately, anyone can mint (create) an NFT token, map it to any object and claim its uniqueness. There doesn’t seem to be any consistent mechanism or solution available to effectively counter this.

The need for decentralised identifiers (aIDs) in the art world

Layering data bricks: DIDs and DDOs

There is an urgent need in the art ecosystem for a new type of digital identifier (the aID) that will unify how we define, store and work with art objects and their immanent metadata across multiple domains. In Part 2 we established that such a solution should fill a certain set of conditions. All of them can be met by an emerging type of tech - decentralised identifiers (DIDs).

DIDs can be understood as identifiers for digital identities not dependent on any form of central governance and being always under full control of their respective owners. When implemented correctly, they are positioned at the very bottom layer of emerging decentralised network architectures and considered to be the smallest unit of verifiable and independently resolvable information (there is no need for a third party to resolve them).

DIDs can be resolved to point to descriptor objects (DDOs), which are plain JSON-LD objects containing the machine-readable data of entities associated with the identifier. By default, everyone is able to resolve a DID and its key-value structure makes it easy to code against. There is also some subtlety to the term identity, as DIDs can be easily extrapolated to assign independently verifiable identifiers to places, usernames, events, organisations, or physical objects; literally everything that is verbose and descriptive, making them a perfect choice for digitally twinning artworks.  

A correctly implemented decentralised identifier has the following structure:

did:[did method]:[did method specific string]

For example:  

did:aid:mm5rdglrrzzdz20xr1luqmfhs0fncjc2dvk3avnlefvrcvg=

The method is usually a short string that acts as a namespace for the DID and points to a definition of behaviour defined in the associated method specification. It tells the system actor how to read and write a decentralised identifier (and resolve its associated descriptor objects) on a specific distributed ledger. The unique method specific string can be multi-part and support additional parameters (including query strings) and acts as a pointer to the actual document containing the metadata.

Each document contains public keys, public claims made by the identifier, service endpoint definitions used for interop system interactions and timestamps for auditability. The documents containing the metadata can be registered both on or off-ledger, leaving some headroom to tiered approaches when designing trust-based platforms. An opportunity of assigning both open and private data to the identifier is very convenient in the context of artworks, due to the secretive nature of parts of the art market.

Verifiable claims for flexible interaction between parties

Another important aspect of decentralised identifiers is verifiable claims. DIDs support the notion of claims-based identity where interaction with identities happens through verification of claims. A claim is simply a statement that one party (or action) makes about itself or about another party (or action). Here, verifiable claims consist of three parts: the subject of the claim (literally anything descriptive), the issuing party, and the claim itself, which is usually a statement about the subject. A verifiable claim happens when an issuer makes a claim about a subject, which is cryptographically signed by the issuing party. From a technical point of view, claims are JSON documents with well-specified data models, but the details of exchanging them between actors (claim issuers, claim holders, and actors that verify them) are left to protocol designers and system implementers (an example of on-going work in this area can be read here).

A tangible example would be more fitting - let’s assume that an art broker would like to put an artwork to an auction, and the auction house would like to know some specific detail about the artwork provenance. The broker obtains a verifiable claim from a renown art expert (or estate), which states that the information provided by the broker is correct. The broker downloads the statement from the art expert and uploads it to the auction house, who then accepts the claim and allows (or disallows) the broker to put the artwork for sale.

What is important to understand here is the flexibility of modeling actors and actions involved in the interactions. Any  descriptive  claim can be created, fit into a secure and confidential distributed network and associated with a decentralised identifier. Then, it can easily become a subject of cryptographically verifiable information exchange. We believe the potential use cases of this DID property are abundant in the art ecosystem.  

The aiD network

Centralised systems are a form of monolithic governance, easy to maintain, prone to failure and suffering from the inability to scale. Actors working in decentralised systems work in the context of no central ordering authority, are equally privileged and thrive in achieving value through collaborative goals.

As suggested in previous paragraphs, the network for persistent aiDs should be decentralised, distributed, sustainable and free from any form of central authority. The following characteristics should be also considered while designing such a solution:

• Mitigations against network locality incidents, where state of information is not equally distributed across peers
• Mitigations against internal and external network attack vectors
• End-to-end encryption for inter-node communication, including digitally signed messaging
• Encryption of data at motion and at rest
• Reputation schemes for authentication and authorisation, which penalise hostile actors
• Governance by distributed consensus models and algorithms
• Cryptography first

Distributed digital ledgers satisfy all the necessary criteria and act as a promising vessel for DID implementations. However, the ledger itself does not sanitise all the endpoints, as a complete solution should have wallets intended for key management, DID resolvers (including bridging to a universal one), attestation APIs and other components developed against the immutable DID store.

What next?

By default, DIDs are ledger agnostic. DIDs can be implemented with almost any distributed ledger technology, the one requirement being compliance with W3C specifications. The ERC-725 is a well-established standard for decentralised identifiers built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Keeping in mind the possible disadvantages of using a public blockchain as the technical backbone of the AIS (aID), a step forward would be to implement an ERC-725 + ERC-735 based proof-of-concept accompanied by resolver, claim verifier and a simple API to consume for application clients. Lessons learned from such exercise would allow us to work on more fitting, federated blockchain solutions, running on network nodes not entirely dependent on public actors.

There is no quick win - share our vision

At Arteïa we would like to disincentive thinkers from reaching the low-hanging fruits and instead inspire everyone to build an innovative and fair network for art. It will take longer but will secure a more fit-for-purpose and sustainable outcome: considering the scale of the expected benefits for the art ecosystem, it is deemed worth the effort and patience.

Using emerging types of digital identifiers built on top of a distributed decentralised ledger further solidifies this direction. Identifiers that carry the context of the data they point to, are easily resolvable at any point in time, cryptographically verifiable from the ground up, and globally unique. The technology-enhanced consensus on the origin and correctness of art records should be driven by the common effort of the collective and be susceptible to verification by all actors in the value chain.

References:
https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-spec/
https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4122
https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld11/
https://www.w3.org/2017/vc/WG/
https://ssimeetup.org/http://www.weboftrust.info/papers.html
https://erc725alliance.org/
https://uniresolver.io/

After getting a glimpse of the landscape of identifiers and some of the organisations that establish standards in the first part of this post, let us now consider an ID for art (aID) and the properties of an organisation that would be able to define it and make it a standard. First of all, we can ask ourselves how artworks are different from books, movies or scientific papers.

What’s in the ID?

First, much of an artwork value comes from the fact of it being unique in the sense that the copy of an artwork (multiples aside) is of lesser significance than the original. This cannot be said about books for example (except for limited and numbered editions). This fact makes the authenticity and the provenance of an artwork hugely important. There is therefore a natural tendency to go beyond the unique identifier for a given object and think about methods and procedures for gathering provenance, defining the process of as well as tools for identifying or authenticating artworks. In our opinion, these aren't issues for AIS to standardise, on the contrary, this is the work of art experts and problems to be solved by diverse non-profit institutions and for-profit companies. AIS should only provide a common component for the tools tackling those challenges, namely the artwork identifier.

The provenance issue touches upon the question of the link between the identifier and the metadata associated with it and the artwork. We believe that the identifier and the very basic information, like the title and the author of the object, should be permanently attached to each other and be visible to all. The provenance on the other hand is often the result of valuable work performed by an expert who might decide that it should be visible only after purchasing access. If one would allow metadata to be hosted by entities other than AIS, which we believe should be the case, the solution needs to include a mechanism for locating such information based on the aID. Moreover, the identifier itself should not be endowed with the notion of ownership, or the ownership of the identifier should be permanently assigned to AIS. One of the reasons is that trying to include ownership would add a significant layer of complexity to the solution, one that would not be needed to fulfill its main objective of assigning a unique identifier to the artwork. This, to a large extent excludes the use of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), as they are explicitly designed to be an asset that can be owned and which ownership can be transferred. Of course this will not exclude entities other than AIS from using NFTs in conjunction with aIDs.

Sustainability

Another unique thing about the Art World is that many of its actors, but especially museums and other institutions, don’t think on the time scale of years or decades but in terms of centuries and generations. One of the consequences is that an acceptable solution must be set up in such a way that even if AIS were to disappear, the solution would remain operational.

Vetting

Lastly but importantly, books, movies, pdfs are well defined objects. Art however doesn’t fit into definitions. In the case of books, publishers apply for ISBN assignment to their respective national ISBN Agencies. Who however can say what is and what is not art, or what are the criteria for somebody to be an artist or not? Therefore, if AIS as a consortium cannot be the judge of what can be assigned an aID, can it decide who can assign it? It seems it cannot. And then, if anyone can assign an aID, can we prevent the creation of identifiers for objects that are clearly not art, which in some way break the law or simply already have an identifier? If AIS itself, or with the help of a partner, were to engage in some sort of vetting or KYC process, would it be able to adhere to the criterion of being sustainable as it was formulated above? Moreover, checking who is assigning the identifier may to some extent discourage bad actors from, for example, attributing a particular artwork title to a wrong artist, but would it prevent them from doing that? Probably not, and more importantly it would not inform us on whether the attribution is wrong in the first place. This touches upon a well known problem of many blockchain based solutions. We can trust the anchored data was not tampered with but the source of the data itself needs to be vetted separately. This is what blockchain doesn’t solve for and, as it is often said in the context of data science and machine learning - garbage in, garbage out. Fortunately, as we underline again and again, AIS is not meant to be an arbiter of truth, not even as basic as an association between an artwork title and its creator name. One might ask however, if anything can be associated with an aID how can it be useful? The answer lies in the fact that vetting can be arranged as a self-organised process, in which only those aIDs that are embraced by members of the art market community become useful and are being used, the rest falling into obscurity. The role of the AIS is therefore to establish a basis for this process in such a way that it has a chance to become the most efficient and effective as possible.

Governance

The adoption and sustainability of aIDs will heavily rely on the robustness and fairness of the governing body underpinning its development, promotion and execution. Below are some steps we think the AIS Consortium should take to ensure a broad and lasting impact.

• Embrace The Modern Paradigm for Standards formulated by OpenStand
• Work out a clearly stated and self consistent:
  • Vision for the Art World (we hope for less fragmentation of information, more transparency and resulting increase in efficiency)
  • Purpose
  • Mission
  • Goals (with a realistic timeline)
• Define and implement transparent rules for:
  • Financing (with a healthy proportion of membership fees, donations and grants)
  • Representatives (with broad participation and at the helm an esteemed person, for example a member of academia independent from participating commercial companies)
  • Access and membership requirements
  • Decision making process (with a merit based approach)
  • Contributions (as balanced as possible, with larger contributions resulting in discounts on membership fees)
  • Intellectual Property management (with the goal for the standard to be freely available and implementable)
• Clearly and transparently formulate benefits of membership and pro-bono contributions
• Introduce inclusive mechanisms for all stakeholders like artists, art professionals to state their comments and opinions and incentivised to do so

Founding attributes of aID

As the reflection of the above and inspired by the examples of identifiers examined in the first part of this note, we believe the solution for aID has to be

• Endowed with the properties of:
  • Uniqueness
  • Persistence
  • Resolvability
  • A degree of decentralisation
• Neutral (not favouring any company, or its proprietary technology, nor any artist or institution)
• Open source (the code needs to be carefully wrapped under one of open source licenses disallowing copy cats and straight IP theft)
• Sustainable (with low operational costs shared equally across its members both in terms of funding and, if possible, development contributions)
• Robust and built to last (its operability shouldn’t depend on the existence of any organisation, even AIS, if possible, by implementing a fire & forget technological foundation/framework)

Benefits to the Art World

The aID will be primarily used when two or more entities (companies, organisations, researchers) will have to perform some tasks on a joint set of artworks.  This can be a shipping company, an insurance company and a collector, each maintaining his own database of objects. With aID implemented in their systems,  the communication between them will be more efficient, especially when they are working together with multiple objects and on different occasions.

Beyond that, the aID (with its properties described above) and the solution built on top of it could bring many benefits to the art community. We list some of them below.

• (In many cases) replacing long descriptive metadata needed to identify artworks.
• Facilitating collaboration, reducing cost, time and probability of errors for transactions like lending and purchase as well as services.
• Facilitating research, helping compilation of bibliographies and Catalogues Raisonnés
• Facilitating adherence to AML regulations and fraud prevention.
• Reducing the number of instances when the task of establishing provenance is needlessly done multiple times.
• Facilitating search of artwork databases.
• Enabling better artwork data analytics.
• Enabling artists to better protect their financial rights.
• Bringing more liquidity to the art market.
• And more...
  
  

In our third, more technical piece on this subject, we will explore the notion of decentralised identifiers and how they can perhaps be used to realise the above vision.

Arteïa is a technology company deeply rooted in the Art Market. This rather unique position means that we look at the Art World and ask ourselves how we can use technological solutions to make it better for all its actors. The problem of information fragmentation and the related issue of trust are two of the biggest challenges that stares back at us (read more about how we view the state of the Art Market here). The personal, cultural or financial value of an artwork is strictly tied to the story behind it. Thus, provenance and the answer to the question of authenticity of an object are two particularly  valuable pieces of information. The lack and difficulty of obtaining them, makes transactions more expensive, risky and sometimes stand in their way altogether. As many other Art & Tech companies, back in 2017 with great enthusiasm, we turned to blockchain technology for the solution.

Early promises, unfulfilled

Then, at the Deloitte’s 11th Art & Finance Conference held in Luxembourg in October 2018, we witnessed how start-ups emerge, claiming they had a unique technical solution that would definitely resolve art provenance issues and, that by some magic, the whole art ecosystem would accept them and willingly populate these blockchain solutions with all known provenance records to build upon them the future of the art world. Obviously, all those solutions relied heavily on crypto tokens. This opportunistic avalanche of provenance related crypto initiatives in the years 2016-2019 showed us that we were heading into a multiple silos’ provenance landscape…  

Lessons taken

During the following years, reflecting on that wave of unrealised promises, building software as well as talking with friends and art business partners we learnt many valuable lessons. Two points stand out in this context.

First, technology can only be a part of the solution. Blockchain by itself won’t solve the provenance challenge. What one can do is build tools that help artists and art market professionals gather and share information in a more sustainable and efficient way. Not by daydreaming about delegating trust entirely to a particular technological solution, but by giving art market actors the instruments that would lower the effort needed to reach the level of trust sufficient for a transaction, be it buying, selling, lending, writing about it or transporting an artwork.

Second, if data fragmentation is part of the problem, one would not solve it with a multitude of competing solutions, each set up to benefit the particular technology company that devised it. This of course leads to more fragmentation. What is needed is an industry wide effort to set up a standard that doesn’t favour any player and can be built upon by any one. We consequently started envisaging something much simpler – a mechanism  that would uniquely identify an artwork. Having such an entity assigned to a specific object would ensure that different actors talk about the same item.

Early 2019, we began to advocate for a joint effort to tackle the provenance challenge as an industry. Soon we were joined by other companies and organisations in the art market. Upon further considerations, our partners and we have agreed that a basic building block that is missing in the art world and a key to the provenance challenge is a unique, standardised identifier that could be permanently assigned to a given artwork. Thus through collaboration and collective action the Art Identification Standard (AIS) consortium was formed and officially launched in January 2020. Now, with 25 members and counting, four months after AIS was first introduced to the public, we are ready to dive deeper into what AIS should be and deliver. Here we want to give Arteïa’s perspective on those matters.

Some ID comparables

First, let us look at well fledged examples of identifier standards and some of the organisational principles that govern them or facilitate similar collaborative efforts. We will start with three successfully implemented ID schemes.

One ID standard that is used around the world is the International Standard Book Number (ISBN). It is a unique, 13 digit identifier with an associated machine readable barcode, that is assigned to each separate edition and variation (except reprintings) of a publication such as a paperback book or an e-book. It can be separated into its parts, a prefix element, a registration group element, a registrant element, a publication element and a check digit. ISBN is governed by the International ISBN Agency (https://www.isbn-international.org/). The registration group element is country, territory or country group specific. The registrant element is assigned to publishers by ISBN agencies in that country/territory. Finally, the publication element is assigned to an example book edition by the publisher. Therefore, there is a three tier structure to the ISBN. The first tier designs and governs the standard whereas the other two tiers, are in a hierarchical way assigning parts of the id which not only identifies the publication, but also the publisher and the national agency.  It is worthwhile to read the benefits of the book identifier the International ISBN Agency lists on their website. Most of these benefits can be claimed by a suitable artwork identification standard. ISBN is specified by the ISO 2108:2017 standard of the International Organization for Standardization.

Another great example of an identifier is the Digital Object Identifier aka DOI, governed by the International DOI Foundation (IDF) and standardised under ISO 26324. As stated on their website,  “the DOI system provides a technical and social infrastructure for the registration and use of persistent interoperable identifiers, called DOIs, for use on digital networks”. In practice, DOIs are widely used for academic, governmental and professional documents. They are not only meant to be unique and persistent, as is the case for the ISBN, but also resolvable, which means that the identifier can be used to access associated metadata, for example an url address under which the object can be found. The structure of the organisation is roughly the same as for the ISBN, with three tiers; the IDF, the registration agencies and the registrants. As there are different kinds of digital objects, often separate registration agencies deal with them accordingly. For example EIDR governs a universal unique identifier for movie and television assets, whereas Crossref manages research output. For a great overview of the DOI system read the IDF’s introductory material.

As the third example, we want to bring attention to the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), a unique, persistent and resolvable identifier owned and controlled by researchers and research contributors. ORCID IDs are a subset of the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) and are compatible with ISO 27729. No information about a person is encoded in the ORCID ID. The identifiers were designed to be usable in situations where personally-identifiable information should not or can not be shared. They are a big success in the research community with more than 7 million ORCID IDs issued to date. ORCID solves the problem of ambiguity of human names. Interestingly, its parent standard, ISNI includes artists as possible ID recipients. The structure of those organisations is quite similar to the ones we already learned about - an international governing entity gathers institutional members that give out IDs to their owners, who in this case are the ones being associated with an identifier. Sometimes the registration agency compiles its own database of ISNI identifiers augmented with additional metadata and capabilities. An example of that is Quansic, which focuses on performers, songwriters, actors and film directors.

We see that IDs used in different sectors of the industry are meant to be unique, persistent, and sometimes resolvable. How the organisations associated with a given IDs are structured is part of the solution to the problem of assigning unique IDs in a sustainable and efficient manner. The ID can but doesn’t have to encode information about the object or person it is associated with and this depends on how the ID is meant to be used.  

How to organise collaboration

Now, we shall very briefly discuss some of the axioms and principles guiding standardisation organizations. What arises are matters of governance, membership, access to information, intellectual property rights and the overall vision. This is a broad field so we will tap only in some of those.

Established in 1947, the International Organization for Standardization (ISP) is in itself a standard for a standardisation organization. It is therefore worth mentioning that it is non-governmental, independent, a non-profit, with a clearly defined purpose of making International Standards which encourages a common understanding and cooperation with all stakeholders. Notably, some ISO standards are not free of charge to examine or learn from.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), established in 1994 is a more modern example. As the main international standards organisation for the World Wide Web, its mission is to “lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web”. It emphasises a consensus based process. In 2012, it adopted the Modern Paradigm for Standards formulated by OpenStand, which we strongly recommend to read. Members of the W3C pay membership fees adjusted based on their country, revenues and status. The main benefit is that they have access to software and documentation produced by the consortium prior to release of such software and documentation to non-members, those can however be incorporated into the members’ products only after such a release. The membership agreement protects the intellectual property rights associated with the work of the consortium by placing them in the hands of the “Hosts” (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University and Beihang University), which in turn grant the members licence to (almost) freely use the developed software and documentation. Notably, W3C is working on a standard for Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs).

Let us mention two final examples we feel can be  inspiring when designing the prerogatives for AIS. One is the OpenID Foundation, a non-profit international standardisation organisation of individuals and companies committed to enabling, promoting and protecting OpenID technologies. It aims to make its specifications freely implementable and to this end the members sign a non-assertion agreement. The other one is the Sovrin Foundation, a private sector nonprofit institution, whose mission is to “create the Internet’s long-missing identity layer and provide a global public utility for digital identity to people, organizations, and things”. The way Sovrin wants to realise its vision is by using blockchain technologies with the above mentioned decentralised identifiers. For this reason their technological solutions and governance framework are well worth studying.

In the second part of this article we will examine how artworks are different from books or movies, and, based on the lessons learned by examining the above solutions, we will propose the principles that the AIS should in our opinion embrace and the properties the artwork identifier should have.

A growing global wealth inequality combined with the financial crisis has taken a toll on the art market. The rich, getting richer, drive the prices of already extremely expensive artworks up. This makes the overall value of transactions concentrate in the higher-end (price-wise) of the market. On the other hand, the bulk of the artworks is produced in the lower-end. There, with the poor struggling and the middle class in many Western countries shrinking, the supply for art is high and the demand is low. “The middle-range of the market is squeezed by the upper tail (in value) and the bottom tail (in volume)”. ^[1] Consequently, the game is dominated by big players: powerful dealers, huge auction houses and international art fairs. The rest are struggling. This in turn has a negative effect on the quality of art: deterring incumbents, promoting the market approved styles and tempting the stars to produce what is already selling well. Furthermore, in an unregulated market, treating art as a commodity and an investment, enables it to become a vehicle for money laundering and tax evasion. This diversity suppressing polarisation, resulting in “the squeeze”, has been quoted to be one of the most pressing issues facing the market today, and a vital influence on its future shape ^[2].

These “external” circumstances driving the future of the art market are underscored by the traditional “internal” pains: the lack of transparency, low accessibility to provenance data, forgery and illiquidity.

First, a limited number of main actors own most of the market’s data. This is especially true relating to price information as it is only available through public auction sales. Price setting mechanisms are mostly opaque and hard to comprehend from an external point of view. Similarly, being able to spot an emerging artist is often restricted to a few well-introduced figures in the market. This gives the latter the ability to manipulate the market by artificially promoting their artists of choice.

Second, provenance remains a major issue in the art market. Defining the historical record of ownership as well as appearances in exhibitions and publications of a work of art, provenance represents not only the economic and market conditions governing the sale or transfer of the artwork, but also a record of changing tastes and collecting purposes. Most importantly it helps establish the current value of the art piece by providing information about the events that shaped its lifetime. A complete and reliable provenance record can be used to certify the authenticity of a work of art by having better insights on its lifecycle. Most artworks lack a clear chain of ownership, making it complicated to establish whether the piece has not been tampered with. Moreover, even if provenance is determined, it is rarely shared, and the work needs to be redone when the artwork appears on the market again.

Third, verifying the authenticity of an artwork is extremely hard and is often speculative. The sector relies on experts whose knowledge can help attribute an artwork to a certain artist or on forensic analysis to verify whether the piece was crafted at a certain period. Unfortunately, these methods present some limitations and a margin of error. The safest approach is to have a certificate of authenticity (CoA) from the artist and a complete provenance record linked to the artwork. This however is often not the case.

Finally, art is an illiquid asset because selling an artwork is not an immediate process regardless of the type of mechanism used. Dealers, auction houses, agents and galleries usually incur complex processes to complete a transaction. Purchase and resale fees can be so high that an investor needs to wait several years before reselling just to recoup their initial investment. Furthermore, the market rarely appreciates when an artwork reappears in the secondary market too quickly as it can be perceived as opportunistic (“flipping” an artwork runs the risk of tarnishing the collector’s reputation, hence their future ability to access prime artworks). Another issue linked to liquidity is the high rate of late and cancelled payments. This is an important problem in certain sectors and segments of the market, leading to cashflow problems for smaller businesses that cannot absorb the risks. In the primary market it also has a deflecting impact on artists, who are usually paid at the very end of the chain.

Whereas the “external” economical situation drives the art market towards polarisation, the “internal” problems with transparency, provenance, forgery and liquidity are captured by the notion of fragmentation.

A fragmentation of information means that for key actors of the ecosystem it is expensive, difficult or even impossible to obtain the knowledge crucial for taking decisions on valuating, selling, buying and lending artworks. A fragmentation of tools and standards for managing art related data means on the other hand that it is harrowing for experts to conduct research and provide the information in a fair and sustainable way. Thus the notoriously slow and conservative art market (worth 64,1 billion USD in sales in 2019 ^[3], with 9% of that being online sales, with an additional $19.9 billion spent on a range of ancillary and external support services directly linked to the art related businesses), with its polarisation and fragmentation, needs to evolve and adapt. Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope on the horizon.

It turns out that, faced with such circumstances, artists, often versed in the technologies of the XXI century, experiment with different retail channels and opportunities. Particularly, they increasingly use social media, with Instagram at the forefront, as a tool for marketing and connecting with their audience. For example, in Australia, where such studies have been done ^[4], between 70 and 80% of artists promote their work on the internet and almost three quarters of them state that they are themselves its most active promoters. In the meantime, many test crowdfunding platforms and new patronage models. Finally, there is an ongoing search for viable ways for artists to preserve a part of equity in the artworks they produce.

Galleries too are starting to embrace online tools. Already in 2018 the online sales were identified a key method to access new clients ^[5]. Thus, hiring of staff members dedicated to manage the galleries online presence is rising and the superiority of a hybrid, online/offline storefront is embraced ^[6]. Not everybody can afford a professional website so smaller galleries are looking for online service providers that can boost their presence on the internet or look for opportunities for consolidation.

As to the art collectors, we are facing a generational change. Some of the signs of a modification of attitudes are already there. First, collectors are increasingly willing to share their art publicly, this becoming “almost a kind of social responsibility for many” ^[7]. Second, even though trust still remains an issue, they are buying art online. According to a survey by Artsy ^[8], 64% reported that they had purchased art online in the past and 36.3% of online buyers claim they spend more than half of their annual budget there. The same report claims that passion is the most important driver for art collectors. Factors like an artwork’s aesthetic qualities, the story behind it (and behind the author), and its ability to inspire the collector all significantly outranked investment and socially motivated factors. Associated research also indicates that Gen-Z consumers are more likely to be motivated by how the brands—in this case, the artists—they consume relate to their personal identity and community, as well as causes they care about. A similar observation was made in a 2020 artnome.com article making predictions for the market. There, the author asserts that younger generations, Millennials and Gen-Zers in particular, embrace diversity, are more concerned with issues like climate change, and more comfortable with technology, with all those factors prone to influence their choice in art and the way they buy it ^[9].

The coronavirus pandemic has only accelerated the trend of looking to online channels for sales and promotion.

The demand for (time-based) online viewing rooms has exploded and some art fairs will be held entirely online this year ^[10]. Artists were not passive either. For example, the #artistsupportpledge, a movement to support artists and makers during Covid-19, has grown to over 220 000 posts in social media, generating an estimated £20 million in sales globally ^[11]. The jury is still out on whether this trend will persist after the pandemic, the impact of COVID-19 on the art market is however unquestionable.

The legal landscape is also shifting. The 5th Anti Money Laundering Directive (5AMLD) came into force in the EU in January 2020 and was replicated in the UK and US. Actors involved in transactions of art worth more than €10k are now obligated to adopt a risk based approach. This includes performing customer due diligence, financial crime compliance record keeping and reporting. Many of the dealers and galleries are not prepared to comply with those requirements. Part of the burden is additionally moved to collectors. Beyond the intended, obvious, positive consequences, the 5AMLD will bring additional friction to the market, and in turn an opportunity for those entities prepared to efficiently alleviate it.

Last but not least, we are living in the time of consequential technologies maturing before our eyes. First it was the internet, with social networks, the cloud and software as a service applications. Now, machine learning techniques are rapidly developed and applied to automate tasks and perform complex inference. Soon blockchain related solutions will start reaching maturity and gain the efficiency and user friendliness required for broad adoption.

Arteïa is here to connect all those dots.