Provenance II
Back in 2018, we started talking about the idea of blockchain as a mechanism for establishing art provenance. At the time, there had been a string of highly-publicized art forgery scandals involving counterfeit paintings, falsified ownership histories, and fabricated authentication documents circulating through galleries and auction houses. The traditional systems of provenance — paper trails, expert opinion, institutional trust — suddenly seemed much more fragile than the art world liked to admit. We became interested in whether a distributed ledger could function as a kind of incorruptible certificate of origin: a permanent, transparent historical record capable of following an artwork from creator to collector without relying entirely on centralized gatekeepers.
Of course, we were not alone in those conversations. Within a few years, that same conceptual territory gave rise to the explosion of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. At first glance, NFTs appeared to fulfill the original promise elegantly. A digital artwork could now possess a traceable ownership history embedded directly into a blockchain. Scarcity could be simulated for digital objects which otherwise replicated infinitely. Artists who had historically struggled to monetize online work suddenly had access to direct markets. The rhetoric surrounding NFTs often framed them as a democratizing force — a way to bypass galleries, institutions, and intermediaries while returning power to creators themselves.
But somewhere between the ideal and the implementation, the entire thing became spiritually poisoned. What began as a conversation about authorship and authenticity rapidly transformed into a speculative gold rush. The technology intended to establish provenance became subordinated to financialization almost immediately. In practice, the NFT market often seemed less interested in art than in liquidity, status signaling, and artificial scarcity. The artwork itself became strangely secondary to the token attached to it. Collectors purchased hyperlinks pointing toward images hosted elsewhere. Projects emphasized “floor prices” and market caps more often than aesthetics or meaning. Entire communities formed around extraction and flipping rather than stewardship or patronage. It became difficult to escape the feeling that many NFTs were functioning less like artworks and more like unregulated financial instruments wearing the skin of culture.
There was also a deeper conceptual problem lurking beneath the hype: provenance is not the same thing as authenticity. A blockchain can verify that a token was minted at a particular moment by a particular wallet, but it cannot verify the legitimacy of the underlying claim itself. If someone uploads stolen artwork and mints an NFT attached to it, the blockchain will preserve that theft with perfect fidelity. The ledger records transactions, not truth. In many ways, NFTs revealed how much the art world had already drifted toward treating ownership records as more important than material experience. The promise of technological certainty obscured the fact that art derives much of its meaning from social context, trust, interpretation, and human relationships — all things that resist automation. You cannot solve cultural legitimacy entirely through cryptography.
What fascinates us most in retrospect is how accurately the NFT boom mirrored the broader trajectory of the internet itself. A technology initially associated with decentralization, experimentation, and creative possibility became rapidly absorbed into systems of speculation and platform capitalism. The dream of artist-controlled economies gave way to marketplaces, influencer culture, venture capital, and algorithmic hype cycles. Yet even within that collapse, there remains a useful lesson. The instinct that originally motivated those 2018 conversations was not entirely wrong. Artists do need better systems for attribution, compensation, and provenance in digital environments. The tragedy of NFTs is not that the underlying questions were foolish, but that those questions became trapped inside a culture incapable of distinguishing between cultural value and asset value. The blockchain may preserve ownership histories forever, but permanence alone cannot produce meaning.
