The evolution and future of digital provenance

Since the first NFT was minted in 2014, digital artists and collectors have praised blockchain technology for its usefulness in tracking the provenance, origin and history of a particular work of art. Never before had artists seen a tool that could do everything like the blockchain, an immutable digital ledger that records transactions without the help of galleries or other centralized institutions.

In theory, “imprinting” a piece of digital art on the blockchain serves several purposes: It documents the date an artwork was created, stores metadata descriptions on the chain and links to the crypto wallets of both the artist and the buyer, thus tracking the sales history. somewhat automatic and makes it easier to estimate a piece’s value.

As is common with the advent of any new technology, people enthusiastically embraced this narrative. Finally, artists working in digital media seemed to have a digitally native method of doing what they had previously relied on paper certificates and gallery spreadsheets to do for them.

Blockchain certainly presents a new way to link provenance to someone’s digital identity, but the art community isn’t abandoning its proven archival methods just yet. Regina Harsanyi, a time-based media specialist and assistant art curator at The Museum of the Moving Image, recommends that artists and collectors familiarize themselves with the full range of tools—including NFTs—used by galleries, museums, appraisers, and buyers to document a history of works of art.

Checksums: The birth of digital provenance

Digital art’s ancestry goes all the way back to a cryptographic function known as a checksum, a string of numbers and letters used to detect inconsistencies in a digital file. Checksums use an algorithm to scan the pixels in a digital file and generate a hash function, which results in a string of numbers and letters.

“[A checksum] essentially allows you to use your own computer to create a fingerprint for a digital asset,” said Harsanyi, who added that she uses checksums regularly in her work as a digital art conservator. “This is a very old technology that has been used in encryption for decades.”

Any changes to the file’s pixels will result in a different series of characters, thus confirming whether a file is the same as the original.

Hardware solutions

Digital artists have also used various hardware solutions such as both storage systems and provenance verification tools. Over the years, these devices have ranged from floppy disks, cassettes and CD-ROMs to USB and external hard drives – and even the computers on which the artist created his pieces.

“On very early personal computers – especially the Commodore or Texas Instrument – you used to be able to back up your data with a cassette player,” explains American artist Siebren Versteeg, who has worked in digital media since 1999. “You’d press ‘record’, send the image or data of the file to the cassette player, it would make it sound not unlike the classic AOL noise, and you could play it back on your computer later.”

Nathaniel Stern, an American interdisciplinary artist and scholar who has featured NFT artwork on Quantum, SuperRare and other marketplaces, says he has built his own circuit boards when creating multimedia exhibits. He recalls a 2004 installation he sold to the Johannesburg Art Gallery, which ran on a custom array of hardware. His installation included a two-sided screen, cameras and projection equipment that ran software that Stern coded. Stern sold every piece of physical equipment to the gallery. The sale price also included the gallery’s rights to lend the installation to other institutions and receive free software upgrades as needed.

“To make it feel special, I ended up selling a custom wooden USB stick,” recalls Stern. “I put the files on the USB stick, signed the USB stick with a Sharpie and put it in a decorative box.”

Today, an artist may have to sell only the NFT associated with the video as a means of authenticating ownership and granting intellectual property rights (IP). However, artists may still choose to sell their work in the form of a hardware unit – especially when a file requires a machine with custom specifications.

Paper solutions

Stern says he also included a paper certificate of authenticity in the sale in 2004. Certificates of authenticity are still commonly used by both traditional and digital artists. They can be issued by the artist, their agent, a gallery or a museum. “Anything that was volatile was usually tracked with a single certificate,” Versteeg said. “I’ve released a lot of them, and I still do when I release a digital piece.”

But as Elena Zavelev, CEO and co-founder of art education organization CADAF, points out, just because certificates of authenticity are standard practice doesn’t mean they themselves are standardized. “The problem with certificates, as with any other aspect of the art world, is that there really aren’t any regulations. It’s a very unregulated market,” she says.

Nevertheless, Zavelev says that paper certificates have always worked well, especially since they usually come with a hardware device that contains metadata about the artwork’s provenance. But when digital art moves to the even more unregulated terrain of the internet, she says, the provenance starts to get really slippery.

“With the internet, people can just start copying things, taking screenshots and video recordings from the screen,” Zavelev explained. “They can present [the artwork] in any way they want. And then it is very difficult for the artist to prove that the work is actually by them.”

Gallery solutions

Along with certificates of authenticity, art appraisers and historians recognize gallery-issued documents as acceptable forms of provenance. These documents may include invoices, labels or stickers, sales ledgers and curatorial spreadsheets.

“We as appraisers do a little bit of detective work,” said Muriel Quancard, a New York-based art appraiser and consultant with 27 years of experience in a multidisciplinary, technology-driven art practice. Quancard explained that she often looks for labels, emails, gallery receipts or invoices to prove an artwork’s history.

Galleries can also create private databases and ledgers to keep track of their sales. “These private database solutions are on a case-by-case basis with certain studios,” Harsanyi said.

Oral ancestry

Given the modern nature of digital art, most creators are still alive and can therefore provide oral histories of their work. This fact helps appraisers and collectors verify information and provides a buffer against digital art theft, Zavalev explained.

“You can just call this artist and say, ‘Did you produce this artwork at this time? And is this your artwork? I think that’s the beauty of working with living artists.'”

Appraisers themselves also act in some ways as a living ledger. However, Quancard adds that an appraiser cannot individually hold enough information in his brain to keep track of the “massive amount of works that have been produced”.

Why is ancestry such a big deal?

Each of the artists included in this article acknowledged that provenance is important, although historically it has been more of a concern among collectors, appraisers, and institutions than for the artists themselves. But today, blockchain has changed the narrative around provenance in both exciting and questionable ways.

“For me, the provenance of a work of art was the story behind it,” Stern said. “But now it’s about who owned it, who transferred it. […] People, when they mean provenance, they mean purchase [the art] on the chain and tracking of each transfer.”

The question is who benefits from ancestry? Artists or speculators? And does the data recorded on the blockchain satisfy traditional guidelines for assessing a work of art’s value?

Quancard claims that the blockchain’s data, while useful, is incomplete. First, traditional assessments take into account whether a work of art has ever been owned by a notable figure. In Web3, many NFT collectors prefer to remain anonymous, and just because the public can track the activity of the cryptowallet’s art purchases, it does not mean that we know the identity of the collector behind it.

In addition, formal appraisals must take into account guidelines from the Internal Revenue Service, insurance companies, and professional standards such as the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice. It is impossible to get an accurate understanding of an NFT’s valuation by looking at blockchain metrics alone.

“Assessment is based on a methodology,” Quancard said. “Provenance is a big part of it,” she added, but cautioned collectors against assuming that financial metrics such as floor price and trade volume provide enough information.

Interestingly, the culture of speculation among NFT collectors has also increased the speed and frequency of digital art sales to never-before-seen levels, Harsanyi added. Spurred by the recent crypto bull run, speculation has run rampant over the past two years, resulting in an environment of constant trading. Digital art used to be relatively niche, Harsanyi explained — if a famous artist sold a piece, it wouldn’t sell again for years or decades.

“Now the same work sells about 20 times over a two-year period,” Harsanyi said. There has never been anything like it before in the history of art, period.”