“…the bigger issue involves the so-called ‘secondary market’ for these pieces, i.e., everything after the original sale from the gallery. As Napster and KaZaA have taught us, once creative works have been digitized, controlling their distribution becomes problematic. In video art, for instance, there is a trading site with everything from Matthew Barney to Nam June Paik available for bartering. Once files start floating around in cyberspace, the certificate of authenticity becomes paramount. And what if that certificate gets lost? That’s precisely what happened with a Dan Flavin neon-light piece recently offered at Christie’s London. Estimated at roughly $83,000 to $117,000, it had to be withdrawn from the sale because the owner mislaid the certificate and Flavin’s estate would not issue another.
Worse yet, after a few decades of electronic-edition works shuttling through the art market’s notoriously opaque channels, faked certificates of authenticity will surely start circulate (just as they do today for Modiglianis and Maleviches). At which point, no expert will be able to distinguish market-legal pieces from their digital doppelgängers. Electronic editions have an allure, removing production hassles for artists, allowing collectors to customize works for their environment, and offering dealers a chance to reap massive financial rewards for simply uploading data files. But perhaps it’s not coincidental that one of the model’s architects, Javier Peres, was a lawyer before becoming an art dealer. Anyone who switches too glibly into this new art-market mode will discover a hornet’s nest of potential litigation and provenance battles.”
More here by Marc Speigler in Slate.