A constellation of enterprising ideas about art and artifact collections.
Last year, I predicted various events and outcomes based on my own experiences and conversations and readings. Those predictions, as they tend to do, varied wildly in their outcome.
We all understand that predictions and “best of” lists and ratings exist for conversation and debate. This year, however, I want artificial intelligence to create the debate.
Unquestionably yes! Whether the Benin objects or the Parthenon Marbles (we do not call them “Elgin” after their plunderer anymore). Almost weekly we see more information about the repatriation of objects.
As I mentioned, a quick reminder that “NFT” does NOT solely equal a piece of digital art. It is a technology that provides scarcity to a digital asset. Scarcity delivers value – whether gold or non-tangible goods. Therefore, it makes many other activities possible beyond digital art possible such as music and events/ticketing. Through their increased application for these purposes will seem into the greater water supply of society and in 10 years we will not understand anything else. I want to speculate on this as it relates to art and artifact collections.
Our databases that contain the vast troves of knowledge about the cultural heritage we steward analog the difference between web2 and web3. When we catalog an object and upload our knowledge of an object to a database, we mostly aggregate and copy information (literally, ad nauseum for me this week) that already exists about an object and store it with one, centralized company. Thus, that company gains a certain amount of power over our data based on its size.
As a lot of “froth” has accumulated around the NFT trend, that they provide scarcity will undoubtedly allow them to weather the fad in the world of collections. Scarcity is the beating heart of the collection, of the museum, of the collectible. We may all have an image of the Mona Lisa, but only the Louvre has the actual work. It epitomizes scarcity despite the flood of reproductions.
The speculative concept involves only shipping objects one-way and thus cutting transportation in half. In other words, you leave your objects wherever you loan them and store the objects in the nearest storage facility that meets your standards. You dispense with the idea that they return to a “home” institution immediately.
In lieu of exclusively associating the recent NFT craze with the bloated, attention-grabbing Beeple sale at Christie’s and the subsequent mainstreaming of the digital token by those eager to capitalize, consider instead, that NFTs, existed long before and will exist long after because they solve an important problem in collections and museums, digital scarcity.
![Savings and [Distributed] Loans](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b818890297114b18b5c6121/ec15f8d5-866e-4556-9dde-4494eb09b974/Distributed+Model.png)
