Blockchain Provenance Tracking Promises More Than Eliminating Forgeries and Risk From the Art Market

As Damien Hirst demonstrated late last month, it’s not just Old Masters specialists who are troubled by dating artworks—dodgy paperwork can make determining the true origins of paintings and sculptures by living artists equally tricky. It was therefore serendipitous that London-based Artclear, a new blockchain company for recording indelible digital certificates of authenticity for physical artworks, recently demonstrated its technology to journalists.

There are a handful of recently founded tech companies vying for position in the provenance tracking space, each relying on blockchain for securely recording information but offering different routes to guaranteeing artwork origin. Artclear, launched in 2020 and entirely funded by angel investors, has developed a patented scanner in partnership with printing giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) Inc. that captures microscopic images of paintings to create digital “fingerprints.” These are then used to provide “unbreakable and tamperproof” certificates of authenticity.

Last month, the company set up two portable scanners in the John Martin Gallery in London to issue certificates for an exhibition of paintings by British artist Andrew Gifford. Similar in size to a digital piano, each scanner has a 1:1 macro lens on the end of a robotic arm that slowly moves to selected points on the canvas and takes incredibly detailed photos of 5×5 mm areas.

“The principle behind the technology that HP initially invented to identify printed documents is that if you squirt ink onto paper, and if you look at it closely enough, the splatter of the ink is unique, like a fingerprint,” Angus Scott, Artclear’s cofounder and CEO, told ARTnews. “This also applies to oil paintings, so you have ready-made signatures built into each artwork.”

Several algorithms iron out any variations in focus, angle, and lighting to ensure the scanner records consistent images every time it returns to analyze the same points on each painting. “We want to eliminate the human element and risk from provenance analysis, “Scott added. Three contemporary galleries in London have signed up to Artclear’s services: the John Martin Gallery, the Lungley Gallery, and Des Bains. Hephaestus Analytical, an art authentication service that uses machine learningis also onboard but Artclear has yet to approach auction houses.

The director of Des Bains, Maria Valeria Biondo, told ARTnews that she believes “Artclear’s scanning technology will give collectors more confidence – as an emerging gallery it can be a great tool to show professionalism.”

All data captured by the scanners is decentralized and kept offline to protect against cybercrime. The digital certificates are then permanently connected to the physical artworks and securely stored on the blockchain. Artclear’s chief technology officer, Sanjeev Kumar, said the company plans to develop much smaller scanners on tripods so galleries, auction houses, artists, and collectors can issue and check Artclear’s digital fingerprints themselves. 

Scott used the example of convicted art dealer Inigo Philbrick, who was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2022, to outline the benefits of Artclear’s provenance tracking. Philbrick created bogus custody receipts in his name for artworks he bought at auction on behalf of a consortium of investors, then went on to sell the works multiple times using the fake receipts.

“With Artclear, the auction house could have assigned ownership to the actual owners, and this would have prevented transfer without their consent,” he said. “Our tech makes it possible to permanently lock down key facts about an individual work of art and verifiably link them to their subject, the artwork itself, and their source, such as the artist. An artist can use Artclear to start a definitive file of information about their newly created works, avoiding the sort of controversy recently faced by Damien Hirst, as well as protecting the value of their oeuvre for their collectors.”

Art provenance specialist MaryKate Cleary believes using scanning technology to track provenance makes sense for primary works and those by living artists but the efficacy of such tools is debatable for historical works. “Provenance research is often a very labor-intensive process – researchers comb through libraries, archives, and scores of documents which are rarely digitized, so you need human analysis,” she told ARTnews.

Aubrey Catrone, another art provenance specialist, told ARTnews that overreliance on technology for provenance analysis is risky because “the current level of AI, for example, is not in a place to replace traditional research methods.” With regards to using the blockchain to secure data, Catrone added that “ideally, the market would unite all provenance and authentication information on one universal blockchain – but this is unlikely because there are so many art market actors and competing interests.”

Artclear is far from the only tech company working in the space. Arcual, founded in Switzerland in 2022 with the backing of the LUMA Foundation, BCG X, and MCH Group, the parent company of Art Basel creates digital and blockchain products with the aim of increasing security in art world transactions. Its unique “digital dossier” doesn’t rely on microscopic scanning of paintings; instead, it logs an ineradicable certificate of authenticity on the blockchain that’s signed by dealer and artist.

“The dossier can include digital or tokenized certificates, resale term agreements, and supporting documentation,” Rodrigo Esmela, chief product officer of Arcual, told ARTnews. “It provides immutable provenance that future-proofs an artwork, records its history and authenticity, and helps with its future resale.”

The company, which can process transactions up to $1 million (while taking a maximum of 1.5 percent commission from both sides), says its technology gives buyers the opportunity to receive digital copies of all documentation. Arcual also says it streamlines the sales process by speeding up payments.

Since its launch in 2022, Arcual has found traction with the art market. Last year, a number of galleries consigned work using Arcual’s Salesroom platform at Art Basel Hong Kong. The company also recently signed a multi-year deal with Future Fair, an art exhibition platform that hosts digital and in-person events to promote artists and small art galleries. Starting this April, the fair will now rely on Arcual to power the technology behind its Digital Companion online platform. “Arcual has built Future Fair’s Digital Companion to deliver on the premise that good products need to deliver value, be easy to use, and be impactful,” Esmela said, adding that the platform will “guarantee secure transactions.”

Artclear and Arcual have a strong focus on eliminating risk from the buyers’ end of the market, but one start-up aimed at benefiting creators is Fairchain, which was set up by Stanford University graduates alongside a group of artists in 2021. Like its competitors, Fairchain’s secure blockchain-backed certificates of title and authenticity (for physical works only) are meant to protect collectors from forgeries and disputes, but they also give artists the assurance that they’ll receive a resale commission every time their work changes hands on the secondary market.

Fairchain’s co-founder Charlie Jarvis told ARTnews that the venture “allows artists and galleries to certify works without any hardware or complicated set-up requirements,” while the “suite of ownership management tools makes it easy to manage the entire sale process.”

The venture-funded company which charges a percentage on each transaction collaborated with Artsy in 2023 for Black History Month, organizing an auction of eight Black artists. The partnership was billed as “a powerful stance in favor of sustainable, thoughtful, and meaningful support of creative communities [because] the auction allows artists to establish a resale commission rate for their artwork so they can maintain an economic stake in every future sale.”

Provenance tracking technology is still in its infancy, but as Artclear’s cofounder and chief business officer, Charlotte Black, told ARTnews, the potential of using blockchain to guarantee artwork authenticity stretches beyond eliminating forgeries and risk from the art market. “We hope Artclear will eventually enable people to go into an art gallery and borrow against paintings, for example, and also support collateral products and all sorts of things.”