Can we tokenize art?

It’s our cultural birthright to uniquely express ourselves by creating, valuing, and building markets for art.

Be it a Lichtenstein painting, a unique artisanal object, an artifact, or a CryptoKitty.

Our relationship with these icons is one of our more ineffable behavioral traits as a species. Also, I believe, one of the most important things that bind us together in a collective, subjective act of appreciation and awe

It is remarkable though that how we discover, buy, appraise, insure and sell art today is no different than it was generations ago before the web itself.

Certainly artists today build their reputations on the social web. Catalogues let us browse obviously, but the mechanics of the process is the same as it was when I first started collecting in the late 80s.

There have been many attempts to democratize the very idea of art itself, bringing images out of galleries and museums, to the broader market at less costs, removing scarcity as a criteria for value.

For the most part, all of them have failed.

Even projects I personally loved like 20 x 200 have not bridged the gap between a manufactured attractive image, and an icon that is dimensional and transformational to our spirit.

It’s our nature to mesh together scarcity with value when in that rare instance something connects us to the human circumstance of an image’s creation.

Enter the blockchain and the well-hypothesized benefits of tokenizing fungible objects and now, a host of non-fungible ones as well, like potentially art.

Certainly we will tokenize with fractional ownership highly valued art objects—like a Klee painting or a rare antiquity. This is no different than fractionally tokenizing a building in the financial district in downtown Manhattan really.

What fascinates me is our ability to tokenize and streamline the discovery and sale of broadly ownable objects, both a Cryptokitty, or this massive, hand-pressed Donald Sultan silkscreen I’m sitting under as I post.

How to build a market around this category of emotionally-valued objects that is less full of friction than the antiquated process today where you need appraisals, brokers who make a market for the piece, sell it and transfer ownership.

There is a difference when we talk about traditional, tangible pieces of art with a history of transactions and a documented back story tied to the artist, and something born on the blockchain anew.

One of the significant platform innovations that CryptoKitties has set in motion is the game itself, which is the market value creator of each individual kitten as a unique piece of art.

In my opinion, what is playing out is less a ‘game’ and more the game mechanics of a developing market, as value is built through the genetic uniqueness (and corresponding cuteness) of the cats. Really an algorithmic value funnel with human participation through economic choices to breed, sell or hold

Certainly verified objects—be they a painting or print, a vase or lamp–will be tokenized and make their ways into marketplaces. And most likely, the early projects that platform this value, will be a service for creating the NFT representing each item, or each set of them.

And I can see how net-digital-native artworks, will be as well be in the same marketplace with a rare antique.

What is not clear to me is how all the pieces come together. Where the core focus and vision should be when the end game is really still completely unknown and inchoate.

Where all the laborious, slow processes laid on top of a tangible object of value will be streamlined to build a fluid market dynamic.

Or even once there, and you have this massive grab bag of things, how you build markets and mechanisms for sale that extract value and build cultural interest at the same time?

Markets in art, don’t just happen, they get made. Today by galleries, brokers, auction houses and artists.

Tomorrow possibly by harnessing the smart plumbing of the blockchain to platform this complexity.

What is clear to me is that this is important.

As I walk around my apartment, and fall under the spell of the pieces that represent my life in iconic framed pieces. Or wander along the streets of New York, seeing a Haring mural by a public swimming pool in the West Village with kids yelling and swimming under it. Or sitting in silence, meditating in front of a Jackson Pollack at the MoMa.

This stuff really matters.

Art as an expression of ourselves traded in a trusted marketplace open to everyone matters beyond each individual transaction.

Do share with me people who are thinking about this today. Or projects that are starting to code this into reality.

It’s a part of our world I care deeply about and doesn’t get enough attention.