While the closest most people come to owning a world-famous piece of art is buying a cheap poster from a gallery, art dealers are determined to harness technology to attract new collectors. increase.
Anida Schneider, a former banker living in Switzerland, is one of the people pushing the new ownership scheme. Investors can buy digital her chunks of paintings for a small fee and share in her profits when she sells them.
“Not everyone can invest $1 million,” she said. “So I came up with the idea of splitting it up and building it on the blockchain like a mutual fund.”
Each purchaser gets an NFT, a unique digital token created and stored on the blockchain, the computer code that underpins the cryptocurrency.
Crypto assets have been routed by plummeting values, collapsing projects and growing scandals this year, but the NFT art sector has weathered the storm better than the rest of the crypto world.
NFT artwork accounted for about $2.8 billion in revenue last year, according to analyst firm NonFungible, with only slightly lower revenue in the first half of the year.
Collectors and artists are the most eager to experiment with this technology, even if it means owning only part of a digital copy of a painting.
One-fifth of the 300 collectors surveyed by the website Art+Tech Report They said they were already involved in so-called fractional ownership.
Schneider’s company in Liechtenstein, Artessere sells square paintings by Soviet artists such as Oleg Tselkov and Shimon Okshteyn for €100 or €200 ($100 or $200) apiece.
She has spent ten years reselling them.
Schneider owns the paintings he sells, which allows him to avoid legal complexities, but his attempt to provide novel digital ownership schemes for publicly owned works is trickier. It has been proven that
‘Complex and unregulated’
Thirteen Italian museums recently signed a deal with Cinello, a company that sells limited-edition digital reproductions, to provide ownership of digital replicas of masterpieces.
Purchasers will receive their own high-definition digital copy to project on screen and a certificate from the museum who will receive half of the proceeds.
The company staged a glamorous London show in February, showcasing digitized works by Renaissance masters such as Raphael, Leonardo and Caravaggio. Since then we have sold only a handful of them.
However, the Italian Ministry of Culture was reportedly offended by Michelangelo’s reproduction. Doni Tondo It sold for around €240,000 ($240,888), but Florence’s Uffizi Gallery took less than a third of the proceeds.
Ministry representatives told multiple media outlets last month that the issue was “complicated and unregulated” and urged the museum not to sign new contracts on NFTs.
“We don’t sell NFTs,” Cinero boss Francesco Rosi told AFP.
Buyers can request an NFT to match their image, but the company says it has its own patented system for securing ownership, calling it a DAW.
mixed blessing
Cinello says he has digitized more than 200 works, the sales of which have generated an additional €296,000 ($297,000) in revenue for Italian museums.
But the company’s difficulties in Italy highlight the pros and cons of NFTs.
With everything from computer game avatars to multi-million dollar cartoon apes, the NFT sector is rife with fraud, counterfeiting, theft and wash trading.
Losi said he was fully aware that NFTs could be used “in the wrong way” and he wasn’t sure what the future holds for NFTs in the art world.
Schneider emphasized that her project is protected by Liechtenstein law. Liechtenstein is one of the first countries to pass legislation regulating blockchain companies in 2019.
Beyond that, she said her insurance would cover damage to the artwork, and although she didn’t give exact details, she also factored in the possibility of the painting’s value declining.
“I hope that doesn’t happen,” she said. “For me, getting this idea to market is very important.”
Updated: Aug 21, 2022, 5:44 AM
