how digital signatures and NFTs create a market for intangible art

This summer I sold my signature. It’s the kind of conceptual artwork that couldn’t really happen before NFTs and the art market became friends. A lot of focus is given to how NFTs allow us to sell “digital goods”, but they actually allow us to sell all sorts of intangibles.

I sold my signature in Unsigned, a Tezos-based collaboration between the artist duo Operator and curator Anika Meier. This in itself is an interesting thing to consider: the existence of the NFT platform, in this case objkt.com, allows a curator with as strong a reputation as Meier’s to work directly with artists, without the regular mediation of institutions or galleries.

Unsigned brings attention to the fact that works of art signed by men increase in value, and decrease if signed by a woman, as Helen Gorrill reported in Guardian. The collection now features the signatures of 100 female-identifying and non-binary artists in hopes of compensating for the negative value that signatures hold. While early online art pioneers like Olia Lialina and Auriea Harvey were very female, the NFT world is notoriously a boys’ club, giving the project a different level of impact.

We tend to think of signatures as physical and the very essence of “handmade”. They are an essential part of the art world, having become widespread during the early Renaissance with the shift from the cooperative guild systems to the individual artist. Could their role in the art world now be undergoing its own renaissance?

What is a digital signature?

Before blockchain, the term “digital signature” generally referred to the process of adding your signature to a document without the need for a printer and scanner or—god forbid—a fax machine. In the blockchain world, where all NFTs are created, digital signatures use encryption to link an identity to a message. The result is a publicly visible and immutable record of transfers that is almost impossible to falsify. This is because the encryption is verified by thousands of individual computers in locations around the world that have been paid with cryptocurrency to be accurate.

Digital signatures are a fundamental building block of blockchains, which are mainly used to authenticate transactions, such as the transfer of ownership. When a collector seeks to resell an NFT, they must prove that they are in fact the current owner of the NFT and are therefore authorized to do so. For the collector of NFTs, this verification happens automatically. The only impact the collector sees is known as a gas tax, the cost of conducting the verification. This gas fee incentivizes the nodes, often individuals in places with cheap electricity, to keep the distributed system up and running. Currently, there are around 10,000 nodes on Ethereum, each performing their calculation of the cost of the electrical power required to power the node versus the cryptocurrency reward for doing so. Whenever an NFT is created, sold or resold, digital signatures are used to verify the process.

The art market for the immaterial

So now the person with the Twitter handle @delta_alpha_ohm owns my signature. Who says? Well, the blockchain does. Because a digital signature can verify the creator, anyone who has the right to sell something intangible can now. It is not clear if a soul is real, but Stijn van Schaik sold his soul as an NFT via the online marketplace OpenSea.

Some of this is hype, and some is brilliant concept work. There is clear animosity floating around the art world as we fight for a distinction. Many are accused of jumping on the NFT bandwagon, but I believe the truth is more complicated. Before the NFT market, many artists had retrofitted their works into an art market that demanded physical, mostly unique, signed objects for us to worship and fetishize. Many practices have not changed as much as critics claim. I’m thinking here again that Auriea Harvey’s website love letter and video game-based work is finally coming into its own. What has changed are the markets.

Artists’ interest in disrupting the art market by creating the unsellable has a long history. Radical changes in art were often accompanied by innovations in verifying ownership. I think primarily of performance art and its related media. Marina Abramovic dropped her first NFTs during Art Basel 2022. The piece was a reprisal of her legendary performance, The hero (2001), which was originally presented as a film. But really, Abramovic didn’t need to have anything visual; her work, in its purest form, could be sold just as Stijn van Schaik’s soul was. Who owns the performative act of Abramovic on a white horse? Who she transferred it to on the blockchain.

Digital signatures, but not NFTs

When people ask me whether or not all the NFT and crypto stuff has a future, I try to go back to the underlying technical shift that blockchain technology allows.

NFTs and cryptocurrencies are applications of blockchain technology, but they are not the whole story. The digital signature process fundamentally changes the way information is stored and verified. The need to have accurate information that cannot be altered by centralized powers, whether auction documentation at Christie’s or global shipping documentation, will ensure that this technology has an important future in the art world.

Verisart, which now also makes and certifies NFTs, entered the art world in 2015 with just such an idea. My paintings, along with those of 25,000 other artists, use the platform to certify the transfer of ownership, thus creating a digital provenance. When an artwork is completed, I create a digital certificate of authenticity that includes a photo, material information, and the option for other supporting documents. I use this area to include conservation information. This certificate is then registered on the Bitcoin blockchain, and once purchased, I transfer the certificate to the new owner. It creates the kind of irrefutable provenance that art historians dream of.