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Blockchain Fine Art

In 1997, investigative journalist Hector Feliciano published The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art. Feliciano captured many of the provenance issues that plagued the works of art caught up in the Nazi swarm over looted and confiscated art.

When Feliciano’s book came out, New York Times columnist Richard Bernstein wrote: “The Swiss, criticized these days for providing a safe haven for the gold and jewelry taken from the Jews, come off badly in Feliciano’s account. Swiss dealers aided the Nazi effort and profited from it. More important, perhaps, after the war the Swiss government made very little effort to return looted works to their rightful owners. One celebrated collection, that of the Emil G. Buehrle Foundation, Feliciano concludes, ‘contains paintings that were confiscated during the war, paintings whose story is not fully told in its catalogues.’”309

To combat the obscure dealings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which still refuses to aim for transparency, one can rely on emerging new technology to gain access to suppressed information. In particular, blockchain technology—an online ledger with exchanges that verify transactions—which has been the basis for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is set to become the underlying foundation that will revolutionize the art world. This is not some whimsical dream or farfetched idea. There are real companies that are currently using the next generation of blockchain technology, a digital distributed ledger that tracks and monitors the transfers of licensing or ownership of assets.

Why is that important? The blockchain system is global. It’s electronic. It’s open 24/7 from any Internet access point in the world. And it requires clearinghouses to confirm the transfer of an object or property to make that transaction valid.

CoinTelegraph, a website that focuses on digital currency and blockchain, interviewed Masha McConaghy, a curator and cofounder of Ascribe, a Berlin-based startup that uses blockchain technology to register digital medium of all kinds.

On blockchain being applied to art, McConaghy said, “In the physical art world there is a great need in clean provenance. Here [is] where blockchain technology will play an important role. In Germany, especially after the discovery of Gurlitt Collection the provenance research became the most important topic. The unregulated art market is in need for transparency and regulation and blockchain can address a lot of issues.”310

It’s a simple but powerful way to authenticate artwork and art projects and track their history of ownership, from creation to current owner.

On December 7, 2015, I attended a panel discussion in New York City on the technology applied to the art world. The evening forum, Fine Art and the Blockchain: Provenance, Authentication and Value Creation, was hosted by Rik Willard and his blockchain-centric organization, the Agentic Group.

The speakers included Judy Pearson, president of Aris Title Insurance Corp.; Ji Jun Xian, partner Emigrant Bank Fine Art Finance; Jeffrey Smith of Tradable Rarities Exchange, Inc.; and Brooklyn-based Jesse Grushack, blockchain strategist at Consensys, a venture production studio “building applications and end-user tools for blockchain ecosystems.”

Almost two years earlier, on February 18, 2014, Alexander Boyle and I attended a special lecture on art crime by Robert Wittman at the Frick Museum in New York City. In covering that evening’s discussion on how to identify the various forms of art crime, theft, and forgery for Art, Antiques & Design, an online magazine based in the United Kingdom, Boyle wrote:

[Wittman] started out with statistics, estimating the worldwide annual art trade at $200 billion, but of that 3% or $6 billion was of illicit cultural property. That ranges from fakes and forgeries to smuggled items and outright theft. The Federal statutes that enabled Agent Wittman and his team to take action include Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property, Theft of Major Artwork, Hobbs Act, Smuggling, and Mail Fraud and Wire Fraud.”311

In the economically anemic world we live in today, where billionaires look for other vehicles for investing their money beyond bonds, commodities, equities, and real estate, priceless art by the masters has become more important than ever. We have to vet and verify whether a Pollock was created by Jackson Pollock, or a van Gogh painted by the real Vincent. With $200 billion of art traded annually, blockchain ledgers will become more critical in business, even if museums like the Met or others don’t like the transparency that comes with the technology.

The museums will soon have to play by the same new rules as everyone else, as blockchain will likely become the only way to conduct such multimillion-dollar transactions in the near future.

In a separate interview with Coindesk, Stephen Vogler, a German artist, told the online digital currency magazine that he thinks “the blockchain may be the answer to the art world’s perennial problem, authenticity.” He added, “The blockchain is the first decentralized trustable database, which can track the ownership of virtual properties in a reliable way.”312

Blockchain technology, which will let an artist or a writer register a digital “work,” assigns the number of editions for a particular piece and then allows for the electronic transfer and tracking of editions, which future buyers can then authenticate.

Naturally, blockchain or other digital authentication systems could not have prevented masked gunmen from robbing the Emil G. Bührle Foundation’s museum in 2009, escaping with $163 million worth of Emil Bührle’s handpicked art. The four stolen paintings were by Degas, Monet, Cézanne, and of course Vincent van Gogh.313

The Washington Post article that covered the brazen, daylight theft said, “Daniel Heller, author of Between Company, Politics and Survival: Emil G. Buehrle and the Machine Tool Factory Oerlikon, Buehrle & Co. 19241945, said Buehrle repurchased seventy-seven paintings after the war from a Jewish dealer, after the Swiss high court ruled the works had been stolen.”314

Who says karma doesn’t have a sense of humor? Looting the looter has a certain ring to it, a certain panache.

In 2012, European authorities recovered the last of the stolen art from the Swiss heist with the Cézanne painting, recovered in Belgrade, Serbia. Bührle’s pride and joy, van Gogh’s Blooming Chestnut Branches, was “discovered undamaged in a car outside a psychiatric hospital in Zurich soon after the robbery.”315

In 2015, the Emil G. Bührle Foundation closed its museum doors and will move into a new museum in downtown Zurich, where Oerlikon-Bührle AG held its offices and tool works from the 1930s through the 1950s. The building is currently undergoing renovation with plans to be open to the public in 2020. But the Bührle history is more complicated than one can see, so who knows how karma will treat the renovation and grand opening of the new exhibit? When it does finally open, the paintings should be enjoyed. There are no fakes left.

In 2015, Lucia Foulkes, at Boston College Law School, wrote a twenty-five-page brief titled The Art of Atonement: How Mandated Transparency Can Help Return Masterpieces Lost During World War II. She made a convincing argument, from a legal standpoint, that “the United States government should act unilaterally to transform the moral responsibility of government bodies and museum officials into an enforceable legal duty.”316

What would the battery of lawyers who represent MoMA and the Guggenheim think about dropping their staunch defense of artwork sold under duress? And what about the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Would the arrogant, stonewalling institution play ball?

Not of their own accord, they wouldn’t. They have proved that time and again. How would the Met feel about a unilateral decision to restitute all Nazi-confiscated art? How would the Met’s board of directors feel if the federal government stepped in and forced the museum to open its doors of secrecy and share its condition reports—on genuine and fake paintings—with journalists and art experts alike?

Since that is unlikely to happen, investigative journalists need to probe other suspect artworks at the Met and elsewhere themselves, especially those created by the masters. Wheat Field with Cypresses isn’t the first van Gogh to be examined as a forgery, and it won’t be the last.

One recommendation this author can make to the Van Gogh Museum is for it to take up the blockchain system on a trial basis, use it for a couple of its van Gogh paintings with clear provenance, and go back in time and register those artworks as if the past owners were alive today. Such a mockup might demonstrate to the directors and experts of that museum the benefit of using the online distributed ledger technology. It could then be used for loans of artwork to other museums, tracking the paintings’ movements around the world until they return home.

If the Van Gogh Museum likes the technology, then perhaps it can reach out to other museums around the world and begin a trend, digitally putting their artwork online in a series of past-dated transactions, while using the blockchain method to record the details of their art’s travels on future tours and exhibitions, each step of the way.

Now that would be a brighter, more transparent future. Something I believe the brothers van Gogh would approve of, were they alive today in the twenty-first century.

I have spent three years of solid research on this one painting, Wheat Field with Cypresses, a process that was similar to dropping a rock in a pond and watching the ripples race out from the center. There were many paths to examine along the way.

What should the Met do with its van Nogh painting, Wheat Field with Cypresses, that hangs today in the Annenberg Gallery? It will never leave the museum again, but not because of some old, stale agreement with Walter H. Annenberg that the Met promised to honor. No, it can’t leave now because this book has clearly outed it as a work of art created by another hand.

The Met is under no obligation to be transparent. But that, I suspect, will change. The Met does not have to share the painting’s true history, or embarrass the Annenberg Foundation by announcing that Walter bought a fake van Gogh in 1993 for $57 million. The IRS, however, might be interested in looking into that massive tax write-off, and whichever insurance company is insuring that painting might have a different opinion than that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

What should the Met do with Wheat Field with Cypresses?

In my opinion, they should leave the fake where it is, trapped in its gallery, hanging on the wall, and honor Walter Annenberg’s wishes. He did, after all, donate $1 billion worth of genuine art to the Met. Let the fake van Gogh be a learning tool and experience for visitors, whether art students, art rookies, art experts, tourists, art professors, or art enthusiasts like me.

Let people compare the real van Gogh brushstrokes found in the same gallery at the same museum, in Vincent’s First Steps and Cypresses. Let them compare, whether by going online or by visiting the National Gallery in London in person and comparing its great example of A Wheatfield, with Cypresses against the Met’s van Nogh.

When that happens, perhaps the Met will throw up its hands and become a little more transparent. Then the staid, crusty old museums of the twentieth century can embrace the future of art meeting technology in this century, and Vincent van Gogh will look down on us and smile one more time with the sun emblazoned in his favorite color—chrome yellow.