How to make your art forgeproof. Create a numbered blockchain series for all your work:
I don't know much about crypto, Bitcoin etc. but when I heard about blockchain's being like a ledger and how it's essential for things like Bitcoin to hold value, it made me think about all those forgeries hanging up in art galleries and how it's a shame that each artist doesn't have a blockchain of their own work. Apparantly, a quarter of all paintings in top museums are credibly suspected of being forgeries. What's their big solution? Signing. Anyone can fake a signature. Catalogue Raisonee's aren't worth the paper they're written on. No wonder art is riddled with so many fakes. There must be a better way! So I made Jompiy, a testnet for CryptocuRency. Every Jompiy is assigned a number at birth and recorded on the Jompiy blockchain, aka the Jompiy website. I called Jompiy "The Bitcoin of Art" and started giving them away to members of the public. Here's a photo of me doing this on the Southbank outside Tate Modern a couple of years ago:
Jompiy was the begining of Free Art Frees Art and has become my online name on crypto-social sites. It was a testnet in that I didn't know what format to best make the artworks in. I tried around 15-20 and gave each a letter. By far and away the best was Jompiy series G, so when it came to CryptocuRency I used the Jompiy G format to make each of the four CryptocuRency's: BitcoYn , EthereOm , DogecoYn and AlgoranB The ledger for each cryptocuRency consists of photos and videos that are kept freely available online. Forgeproof. If you have a real Jompiy you can rest assured that no one will be able to make a fake one as detailed front and back photos and videos exist of each one, and each are numbered, meaning it's easy to check if any contender is a forgery. You can't just fake any old Jompiy, like you can a Picasso or Monet. A forger would have to perfectly fake a specific artwork that is, not only, able to be checked via public detailed photos and videos, but is also already in existence somewhere else. It's an impossible task to reliably fake a Jompiy, or any series of works that has such a bullet proof ledger. There's also a confirmed number of each series, again, making forgery impossible. Why the art world hasn't adopted this policy en masse is beyond me. Maybe because there's too much money in fakes being, not only tolerated, but encouraged. I know someone who has worked at two major art auctioneers, and she's told me that if they get a potentially valuable artwork to check, they will send it to ten experts to authenticate. If nine say it's a fake and one says it's genuine, it gets passed as genuine. One famous and reformed forger in England said he once submitted a fake Monet to a major aution house that passed their scrutiny, even though he painted it using household paints instead of oil. What a gap in the market there is for us honest types!
I use the Jompiy blockchain model for all my art series. Here's the latest addition to the Blond Cards blockchain. An hour long video I recorded yesterday of numbers 408 to 750. Try and forge one of these: