A constellation of enterprising ideas about art and artifact collections.
The logic of the argument focuses on carbon emissions where air freight vastly out-pollutes sea freight. While I fully side with the GCC’s goals and intent, sea freight hardly qualifies as clean as it emits other noxious bi-products including CO2 by fueling the tens of thousands of ocean vessels with fossil fuels.
Though this information creates a glut of value for the user, we should take a moment to consider risks associated with how the attainment of the information affects our institutions.
Network connectivity creates a tiny crack in the foundation as data breaches become a possibility anytime something connects to the internet. Such a fissure – though extremely unlikely – will allow a malicious third party access to the whereabouts of your objects.
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.
Surely, you have heard the recent story about the group of people who banded together to raise over $47,000,000 to bid on an original edition of the U.S. Constitution. Well, they nearly won it. Constitution DAO formed with a single goal: to crowdfund enough money to purchase the holy, historic document from auction at Sotheby’s. And while a literal “we the people” ironically lost out in a bidding war with a single billionaire – who at least will loan the document to a museum – the act demonstrates populist power ramifications that can extend to collections stewardship.
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.
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.
