> I find blockchain especially interesting for digital and interactive art installations.
Please expand on this. Do you mean in terms of a blockchain being part of the installation itself and made "tangible" by visualization or are you thinking of something else?
In 2004 I went to Ars Electronica[1], it's a really interesting art/technology event where technology, academia, and art scene meets. If you haven't been you really should.
Anyway, one of the sessions was with an artist who did interactive art installations which included both software and physical elements.
One of the discussions he had which really stuck with me was the idea of a sofware update/upgrade. I.e. a customer buys a piece which includes software. Now do you actually sell the update or do you provide that for free. The thing is that with that kind of art installations is that they are fairly easily copyable the software can be copied. This is even more true when you look at what Casey Raes and Ben Fry was doing with processing.
Digital normally means abundant which means that it's hard to know if you have an original (which means artists have to invent other types of monetary models to pay their bills).
Using blockchain would allow for two very important things IMO.
1) It would allow the artist to sell "the original"
2) It would allow the buyer to resell that "original"
3) it would allow for price of the original to increase.
The real power of blockchain is the ability to create a secondhand market (not secondary) for used digital goods completely isolated from the original sell from the artist.
Oh I see, yeah I could see the value of that. Primarily as a novelty I think but still interesting idea. By that I mean I wouldn't expect "all" digital art to be sold like that. But like with how someone was willing to pay a lot for the genesis crypto kitten, I think some pieces of digital art could be sold for a lot on a blockchain. But once sufficiently many different pieces of digital art have been sold like that I think the value of distinguishing between "original" and "copy" will fall back to negligible difference for new pieces. But the first different pieces of digital art will retain their value I think.
My belief is that more and more is becoming digitalized also culture.
Culture is fundamentally an accumulation of history. It's the history part (unique history trail) which is greatly undervalued. A piece of art is valuable because of its history.
That makes it more than a novelty from my perspective it makes it a fundamental part of our digital life.
The art market certainly has aspects best described as a "Keynesian Beauty Contest"[0], and so do Cryptocurrencies.
But while the latter is almost pure "beauty contest", art retains a far stronger connection to the real world: art buyers are very rarely motivated by speculation alone. And even if they want to brag about the $X0,000,000 painting they bought, it helps if they actually like it.
Jason Bailey's (artnome) other work is absolutely fantastic. If you care at all about open access data, art history done digitally, or art in general, definitely give him a follow.
It's trivially easy to upload some scanned provenance documents to your Google Drive, so later you can send them to the next buyer. If that predictably and strongly increases the sale price, why isn't everyone doing it already?
There are other startups like this. People aren't losing weight as much as they'd like, clearly there's an unmet demand that the blockchain can meet! But if you put the problem first, like helping people lose weight or keep track of valuable paperwork, any solution using blockchain would be at the bottom of the list.
I wish I could upvote this comment more than once. I'm getting sick and tired of all the "blockchain is the solution to all problems" hype. Not only is it becoming exceedingly boring, but it's total nonsense.
Sick and tired? May I recommend placebocoin? It uses an innovative virtual blockchain * and the coin value is guaranteed to rise making you feel better about yourself. Try it today!
* virtual in the sense that I haven't built it and have no plans to
Blockchain is great as a secondhand market for things like art as it allows the buyer and seller to both know that they have the original and it allows for a digital art (and even assets to increase in value)
This is a real problem where a non-centralized version actually is the only viable solution (because you can include other things than just digital art).
You don't need a specific token for it you could use a satoshi or some token but it's definitely important if you want to see a digital art market that allow you to have unique items. (You don't have to want that but if you do it's definitely the only solution i can think of that would make sense)
If you want to attribute uniqueness to digital assets then cryptography definitely could help.
But beyond that why do you need decentralisation?
There's a nice to have that you can track ownership transfers more accurately but, as the previous poster said, that's probably not high on the TODO list.
And I think that's the current situation in a nutshell. Blockchain, as a monotonically ordered ledger, possibly trustless, is a useful idea. But it's not the wheel.
Because you want a secondhand (not secondary) market where things can move far far away from the originator plus you can prove it's history which in itself can have value (Bill Gates used to own it). It can live its own life so to speak.
And thats just art, then there is digital art which is an even bigger problem.
It's the unique history + decentralized that creates the value as it becomes more like a physical object.
I don't think it's the situation in a nutshell. It takes time but the art world (especially involving China and Russia) is filled with fakes and fraud.
>Blockchain is great as a secondhand market for things like art as it allows the buyer and seller to both know that they have the original and it allows for a digital art
Does it?
Someone with a blockchain registered Rembrandt has a forged copy produced and passes on the forged copy to you along with the registration, then years later sells the original in another deal through another entity and has the original verified forensically.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 54.4 ms ] threadI find blockchain especially interesting for digital and interactive art installations.
Please expand on this. Do you mean in terms of a blockchain being part of the installation itself and made "tangible" by visualization or are you thinking of something else?
Anyway, one of the sessions was with an artist who did interactive art installations which included both software and physical elements.
One of the discussions he had which really stuck with me was the idea of a sofware update/upgrade. I.e. a customer buys a piece which includes software. Now do you actually sell the update or do you provide that for free. The thing is that with that kind of art installations is that they are fairly easily copyable the software can be copied. This is even more true when you look at what Casey Raes and Ben Fry was doing with processing.
Digital normally means abundant which means that it's hard to know if you have an original (which means artists have to invent other types of monetary models to pay their bills).
Using blockchain would allow for two very important things IMO.
1) It would allow the artist to sell "the original" 2) It would allow the buyer to resell that "original" 3) it would allow for price of the original to increase.
The real power of blockchain is the ability to create a secondhand market (not secondary) for used digital goods completely isolated from the original sell from the artist.
[1] https://www.aec.at/
Culture is fundamentally an accumulation of history. It's the history part (unique history trail) which is greatly undervalued. A piece of art is valuable because of its history.
That makes it more than a novelty from my perspective it makes it a fundamental part of our digital life.
It's like TCP+History that has tremendous value.
But while the latter is almost pure "beauty contest", art retains a far stronger connection to the real world: art buyers are very rarely motivated by speculation alone. And even if they want to brag about the $X0,000,000 painting they bought, it helps if they actually like it.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
A piece of art can go from 20USD to 20.000USD in no time.
My wife works in the auction industry so at least from having followed the world through her it would say it's mostly speculative.
I think there was even an article recently about how manipulated the art world is.
Here's a FiveThirtyEight article about him: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/one-art-lovers-crusade-...
There are other startups like this. People aren't losing weight as much as they'd like, clearly there's an unmet demand that the blockchain can meet! But if you put the problem first, like helping people lose weight or keep track of valuable paperwork, any solution using blockchain would be at the bottom of the list.
* virtual in the sense that I haven't built it and have no plans to
Blockchain is great as a secondhand market for things like art as it allows the buyer and seller to both know that they have the original and it allows for a digital art (and even assets to increase in value)
This is a real problem where a non-centralized version actually is the only viable solution (because you can include other things than just digital art).
You don't need a specific token for it you could use a satoshi or some token but it's definitely important if you want to see a digital art market that allow you to have unique items. (You don't have to want that but if you do it's definitely the only solution i can think of that would make sense)
But beyond that why do you need decentralisation?
There's a nice to have that you can track ownership transfers more accurately but, as the previous poster said, that's probably not high on the TODO list.
And I think that's the current situation in a nutshell. Blockchain, as a monotonically ordered ledger, possibly trustless, is a useful idea. But it's not the wheel.
And thats just art, then there is digital art which is an even bigger problem.
It's the unique history + decentralized that creates the value as it becomes more like a physical object.
I don't think it's the situation in a nutshell. It takes time but the art world (especially involving China and Russia) is filled with fakes and fraud.
Does it?
Someone with a blockchain registered Rembrandt has a forged copy produced and passes on the forged copy to you along with the registration, then years later sells the original in another deal through another entity and has the original verified forensically.
This doesn't do shit.
No one is talking about a perfect solution, you have fake paintings being sold today.
This reduces the risk for fraud and helps propel a digital art industry. And thats just for the art world.
It's fine if you don't believe it to happen, I do and so I am acting accordingly.