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This is Part 1 of our series of articles to help provide a framework for understanding how we can push innovation in generative art and photography

Before we can begin exploring the why of blockchain art, we have to take a step back to understand the current art market

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1. Problems in the traditional art market
2. Enabling Provenance through the Blockchain
3. One key benefit of the Blockchain

— problems in the traditional art market

1. Fakes & forgeries

It is estimated that up to half of the international art market are forgeries and fakes and that even the most sophisticated buyers can be duped.

Simply put, the main reason for this is because there has never been an accepted global standard for recording information in the art industry which means that the key information is only sporadically recorded.

Some of the key information in this context is Provenance

Provenance — a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality

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2. Unreliable external dependencies

As a consequence of the lack of provenance, collectors have had to rely on the opinion of experts -- and we will start referring to this as external dependencies -- to prove authenticity and value

The unfortunate thing about external dependencies is that they are corruptible and prone to error which can lead to enormous discrepancies in value.

Furthermore these issues can be present at many different points across the value chain.

For example:

the artist may be capricious and inconsistent

→ Picasso had many different signatures over his lifetime, and many times didn’t sign his own art
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the collector may be poor custodians and may not take care of their pieces

→ ‘Salvator Mundi’ by Leonardo da Vinci was lost many times and re-discovered, sold for as low as $100 and more recently fetched $450M at auction
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galleries, museums and appraisers may be unreliable or unscrupulous

→ $81M fleeced from unwitting collectors through the Knoedler Gallery by Glafira Rosales
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— enabling provenance on the blockchain

So, what is the blockchain and why does it matter?

Let’s use this definition:

In this case, we can replace financial systems with the art market. There is often no trusted party to enforce trust in a seamless way, and blockchains provide that alternative.

— the one key benefit of blockchain

The blockchain’s one super-power is that it guarantees provenance as a global ledger of transactions that is consistently recorded across hundreds and thousands of computers around the world every second of the day.

In order to comply with the blockchain NFT standard -- ERC721 or ERC1155 -- the key information about an NFT has to be recorded consistently to the blockchain. So when an artist mints their artwork as an NFT they are irreversibly recording their:

→ author id
—— wallet address

→ individual art work id
—— token id

→ collection id
—— collection contract address

→ time of mint
—— transaction hash

All of which cannot be counterfeited by anyone -- including themselves.

At a base layer, this solves the problems of the TradArt world and gives the artist and collectors a provable way to confirm that their work is authentic without the need of an external dependency

— not all blockchain projects are created equal

Just because a project exists on the blockchain doesn’t mean that all art is equal in its utilisation of blockchain’s true potential.

Beyond the basics of securing the provenance of an artwork, there is the opportunity to add more elements of the artwork to the blockchain itself to:

• ensure the image or artwork cannot be lost or tampered with into perpetuity
• more interestingly, for the collectors to be part of the creative process through On-Chain Generative Art

Appendix I – Exploring the Framework

In Part 2 we provide a framework for understanding On-Chain Generative Art, why it is valuable, who is innovating in this space, and where projects can level up to secure their place in the pantheon of blockchain art.

In Part 3 we explore how the REFLECTIONS Collection is bringing innovation to NFT photography by bringing more elements further on-chain through generative art. We share some of the process of On-Chain Generative Photography, the ecosystem around Dream Lab and it’s historical significance as the first on-chain generative photography project on the Ethereum blockchain.