Yes, you can own a virtual work with a virtual certificate: we explain the NFTs to you

How to authenticate a work of digital art, essentially reproducible to infinity? For several months now, technologies from cutting-edge systems such as the blockchain have enabled artists coming from the digital world to certify their works... and facilitate their marketing in the art market.

In New York, exhibitions are now devoted to NFT works. © AFP / TIMOTHY A. CLARY

Rodolphe Barsikian is an artist. His main playground is software, Illustrator, in which he imagines shapes – vector drawings – which he uses to create large compositions in which he manipulates, modifies, transforms these basic shapes. If part of the works become paintings (part of which is currently exhibited in Paris), the heart of the artist's practice resides in digital, dematerialized works... and therefore potentially infinitely reproducible.

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How to certify the authenticity of a work of art that has no material existence? For the past few months, a new technology, coming from a world closer to finance and cybersecurity than to art, has enabled this, and opened up new horizons for the art market. Its name: the NFT – for “Non-fungible tokens”, in French “non-fungible tokens”, which is not more understandable.

Dematerialized but secure certificates

What are these famous "tokens"? They too have nothing material, they are actually lines of computer code, dematerialized certificates attesting to the authenticity of a digital work. "It's quite tricky to explain simply, but to get to the point, the NFT is a digital certificate of authenticity", explains Axel Reynes, expert for the Millon auction house, who is preparing his first sale of art involving NFTs, the premiere in Europe, on May 4th. “NFTs are identified on the blockchain,” he adds. The blockchain is a kind of ultra-secure ledger originally intended to record all transactions made in a cryptocurrency, a virtual currency – each cryptocurrency has its own blockchain, and NFTs are based on the blockchain of Ether, one of them. "The whole point of this authentication on the blockchain is that everyone can see the authenticity of this digital certificate, and that we can have the history of its creation and all its transactions", adds Axel Reynes: "We can thus certify the authenticity of something that is digital. It can be art, music or even a tweet. Anything that we can collect or own".

If you buy a work of art in NFT (in cryptocurrency but not necessarily, if the intermediary allows the conversion), we therefore have, concretely, a web address which is that of the secure certificate in question. And you become the owner of a digital work... that everyone can still see. This is the first paradox of the NFT: it is a certificate of ownership... of a work which, in itself, escapes you, since it is not material. When you buy a painting, you can choose to hang it in your home and never expose it to the public. If you buy a digital work thanks to the NFT, everyone will be able to continue to see it.

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Paradoxes and opportunities

The example that exploded the popularity of the NFT is particularly telling: on March 20, the auction house Christie's sold at auction the NFT of a project by the artist Beeple for more than 69 million dollars (a little more than 57 million euros). The project in question, "The 5000 first days", is a collage of 5000 drawings by the artist who sets himself the constraint of creating one drawing per day. If the work, monumental, therefore represents 14 years of work, its buyer has obtained... a certificate and a JPEG file. JPEG file of which everyone can see a copy online (here, for example); and each drawing of which is visible in large format on the artist's website.

So is the NFT just a speculative tool? This is a question that is debated in the art world, where this type of certificate is still fresh. "We have collectors who are very different for NFTs. In the United States, people who buy NFTs are often people who have made a fortune in cryptocurrencies. We talk a lot about collectors from Silicon Valley", explains Axel Reynes , who says he "wants to bring NFTs into the world of classical art, and to convince classical collectors to take the step in digitizing their collection. But we see that the public is younger, linked to the 'computer science". The other criticism of NFTs is their ecological footprint, because the blockchain on which it is based is extremely energy-intensive – as the Numerama site notes, for the time being the ecological cost of NFTs is largely minor on the blockchain, but if these more "mainstream" applications of the technology develop, they could increase the energy bill of these servers.

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However, the NFT represents a real opportunity to bring into the art market digital works that have been kept out of it until now. For Rodolphe Barsikian, mentioned at the beginning of the article, the works transposed in the form of paintings or sculptures are only the tip of the iceberg: "Thousands of forms patiently drawn by the artist constitute the digital DNA of his work. The forms are archived in digital form and create the heart of the works. These files represent so many digital tokens whose ownership could be acquired by collectors", explains the press release announcing the NFT certification of the works. And the phenomenon also works in the opposite direction: according to Axel Reynes, "a movement called "Burning" is beginning to develop: artists burn their canvases to sell only the NFT of the digital copy". After years of digital art trying to leave the screen to reach galleries, today the opposite phenomenon is developing.