Monetizing Systems and Blockchain Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction

Abstract

Historically, digital art has always faced difficulty with monetization efforts, leaving digital artists vulnerable to piracy. This is due to the digital object's inherent quality to be infinitely reproducible by its very nature. But recently, the art market has explored solving this issue by using blockchain as digital protection software. Blockchain offers quick transactions of digital products without the need for government oversight, corruptible intermediaries (hypothetically), import or export taxes. Its system capabilities as a public ledger are considered useful by those who wish to revisit transactional history over a long period of time. Information input into blockchain becomes permanent unless a large majority of the user base decides to change it. Blockchain's most sought-after feature is its ability to allow intellectual property mechanisms (i.e. a record or authorship, transactional history, contractual agreements, etc.) to be applied to digital works based on mostly automatic computational system functions. Most of the crypto-market is born out of a rejection of institutional banking and centralized financial power; this is an ideological stance came out of the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. But the breakneck pace of blockchain being adopted by certain sections of the art world is due to provenance protections that can be provided for digital art. With blockchain, objects can gain the same monetary rewards with the use of the address code that links the object to the digital original. However, with these protections come questions of how the digital licensing art objects using blockchain changes the structure of the digital object and the power structures that blockchain creates.