PARIS — The
closest most people get to owning a world-famous
artwork is to buy a cheap
poster from a gallery, but art dealers are determined to harness technology to
draw in new collectors.
اضافة اعلان
Anaida Schneider, a
former banker based in Switzerland, is among those promoting new ownership
schemes — for a small fee, investors can buy a digital chunk of a painting and
share in the profits when she sells.
“Not everyone has
$1 million to invest,” she told AFP. “So I came up with the idea to split, to
make like a mutual fund but on the
blockchain.”
Each buyer gets an
NFT, the unique digital tokens created and stored on the blockchain, the
computer code that underpins cryptocurrencies.
Although
cryptoassets have been routed this year with plunging values, collapsing
projects, and widening scandals, the NFT art sector has weathered the storm
better than other parts of the crypto world.
NFT artworks
accounted for some $2.8 billion in sales last year and the rate has declined
only slightly in the first half of this year, according to analyst firm
NonFungible.
Collectors and
artists are among the most eager experimenters with the technology, even if it
means owning only a slice of a digital copy of a painting.
A fifth of 300
collectors surveyed by the website Art+Tech Report said they had already
engaged in so-called fractional ownership.
Schneider’s
Liechtenstein-based company Artessere offers squares of paintings by Soviet
artists including Oleg Tselkov and Shimon Okshteyn for 100 or 200 euros ($100
or $200) a piece.
She is giving
herself 10 years to resell them.
Schneider owns the
paintings she sells, thus avoiding legal complications, but attempts to offer
novel digital ownership schemes for publicly owned works is proving more
tricky.
‘Complex and unregulated’
Thirteen Italian museums recently signed deals with Cinello, a firm
that sells limited edition digital reproductions, to offer ownership of digital
replicas of masterworks.
The buyer gets a unique, high-resolution digital
copy to project onto a screen and a certificate from the museum, which gets
half the proceeds.
The company held a splashy
London show in February
displaying digitized works by Renaissance masters including Raphael, Leonardo,
and Caravaggio. It has since sold a handful of them.
But the Italian culture ministry was reportedly
irked that a replica of Michelangelo’s “Doni Tondo” sold for around 240,000
euros but Florence’s Uffizi gallery got less than a third of the proceeds.
A spokesman for the ministry was quoted in several
outlets last month as saying the issue was “complex and unregulated” and asked
museums not to sign any new contracts around NFTs.
Cinello boss Francesco Losi was not pleased with the
characterization, telling AFP: “We don’t sell NFTs.”
Buyers can ask for an NFT to go with their image,
but the firm said they had their own patented system to secure ownership, which
they call DAW.
Mixed blessing
Cinello said it had
digitized more than 200 works and its sales had generated 296,000 euros in
extra revenue for Italian museums.
But the firm’s difficulties in Italy underline the
mixed blessing of NFTs — they bring publicity but also suspicion.
The NFT sector — which covers anything from avatars
in computer games to million-dollar cartoon apes — is replete with scams,
counterfeit works, thefts, and wash trading.
Losi said he was well aware that NFTs could be used
“in the wrong way” and was unsure what future they had in the art world.
Anaida Schneider stressed that her project was
protected by law in Liechtenstein, the tiny principality being among the first
jurisdictions to pass a law regulating blockchain companies in 2019.
Beyond that, she said her insurance would cover
damage to the artworks and she had also factored in the possibility that the
paintings would fall in value, though she declined to give exact details.
“I hope it never happens,” she said. “For me, it’s
very important to put this idea in the market.”
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