Art Reflects the Identity, History, and Values of a Community.
Art can be extremely valuable to the identity of a community and therefore, it is very important that art is protected. One of the best ways to protect artworks is through the modern protections associated with Intellectual Property Law. This way, artworks are protected from their inception throughout their entire life, including when they are treasured by a new purchaser.
How do you know an artwork is real? More importantly, how do you know it was actually painted by the member of the community it was advertised to be from?
Distribution chains like Australian Beef have already solved this issue. Meaning if the menu says it is Australian beef, you can prove that it is from the restaurant you are consuming it in. This is where the Blockchain comes in to play.
An implemented example of this is at https://beefledger.io/
Food safety and fraud concerns are massive issues, especially in places like China. Australia is a premium producer of safe, high-quality food products, including Beef – which Chinese consumers increasingly seek out. BeefLedger is developing and commercialising an integrated, blockchain-enabled, beef provenance platform, and smart contracting payments regime that streamlines payments, and strengthens consumer confidence in product credentialing.
Some organisations are doing the same in the world of art authentication. Every individual work of art has a unique story characterised by its place of origin, history, culture, inspiration, method of production, creation, journey, and more.
https://indigiledger.com.au/ is recording Indigenous art items on the Blockchain to ensure each item’s authenticity and cultural integrity. Much like BeefLedger, Indigiledger has an integrated blockchain solution to secure the supply chain of Indigenous Australian products, and visual art markets.
The Indigiledger platform produces digital tokens enabling consumers to validate the product’s credentials purchased, via open source technology. It will also incentivise participation from Indigenous manufacturers as the platform pivots Blockchain’s attribute of being an immutable source of truth to secure supply chain markets safely, and effectively.
Another company operating in this area is NDIGI. Here at NDIGI we are developing the NDIGI Authentication Process (NAP) system. The plan is that each piece of Indigenous artwork profiled by NDIGI has been through the NAP due-diligence process, and is then registered in the Blockchain.