Not to lose out to NFTs, two recent headline-grabbing events will push those of us who work with art and artifacts to refine our relationship to technology: the valuation of Masterworks at $1 billion and the use of artificial intelligence by Swiss company Art Recognition in the authentication process of a Peter Paul Reubens painting at the National Gallery in London. While these tech companies are by no means the first to work with cultural heritage, these headlines bring that marriage to the mainstream public. That, in turn, will mean that more players will enter the game and deck our Neo-classical halls with more and more gadgets and software. I do not believe this is a problem as long as we have a hand in it and define our relationship to it as we go.

I have already written about Masterworks and expressed my skepticism of their product as well as trying it out for myself to better understand it. This week, however, the announcement that the online platform selling shares of blue chip works of art has obtained additional funding based on a ten-figure valuation shows the world that veins of gold run through the the mountains of cultural heritage. I anticipate that the scent of money will attract more speculators to seek out a union between technology and all things patrimony.

While Masterworks Beeple-ed the financial news with its surging value, Art Recognition tried to outmaneuver its competition by torpedoing the value of the already-wounded Samson and Delilah. Their assessment – a speedball of AI and machine learning – declared an already-dubious Reubens painting likely not to have originated from the master’s brush. This, however, does not really matter. What matters is that, unlike Masterworks, Art Recognition is one of many companies producing high resolution imaging of art and artifacts that includes Artmyn, Arius, Artentika, and FactumArte.

This celebrity marriage of culture and technology actually excites me because we have long toiled exclusively in the antiquated doldrums of human perception, paper records, and 2D pencils. I personally believe that those “old ways” have a place beside and not replaced by these technologies. I mean that these new tools should enhance our human understanding of our culture and profession and not understand it for us. We can swap a paper record for a digital one and still use human judgement to make assessments and ultimately do our job better.

While Masterworks, using the language of money, overtly commidifies works of art that it locks away for years at a time and denies anyone the ability to view it under the guise of “democratizing investment in art",” it also creates another way for us to employ technology and crowdsource funding for other cultural ventures. What if you could buy shares in a traveling exhibition that paid a dividend in the end? In an object that got donated to a museum and you received a tax credit? At a time when institutions need massive amounts of money to operate, this could offer us further options.

Similarly, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and high-resolution scans of objects will provide us with an infinite number of options to review objects for every purpose. The fact that so much competition already exists here means that the great products will become outstanding and more accessible fast. This also means an exponential increase in the volume of datasets that the AI can analyze (a small dataset was one of the issues with the Art Recognition analysis) which will produce more dependable results.

While I do approach these developments optimistically, I reinforce the need for us to define our relationship to them as professionals and hold tight to the reins of the bucking bronco. These technologies often do not have our interests in mind as they usually do not stem from professionals in the sector, so we must play the lead role here of “The Market” and do our best to deploy them ethically.