yes, I know — but bear with me here for a second...
Yesterday I was at a small birthday gathering. We all had some chili and talked about this and that. One of my friends works at a private art collection that had recently gifted a large chunk of it to another institution. The process of gifting all these art pieces took five years.
A few months ago I watched a documentary on Netflix about one of the biggest cases of art forgery in history, called Made You Look. Whenever high-end art is sold it goes through a process in which the various owners and locations of the piece are verified, which is also referred to as provenance. For many art pieces there already is a good record. In the case depicted in the movie someone fabricated that record and convinced a gallery owner that it is valid, causing some $80m in damages.
Now, have a guess why the process of gifting the collection took so long.
It took so long because proving provenance is hard. These art pieces haven't changed hands in decades, the paperwork proving such transactions is in a binder somewhere down in the archive or in some database used by the collections stewards. Every time a piece changes hands this information needs to be gathered and packaged in a way so that it can then be imported into someone else's database alongside the various documents proving the legitimacy of the transaction.
The longer the time between transactions the harder it will be to verify a paintings records due to database changes, lost files and people dying. If you write it into a blockchain and verify a transactions validity at the time of the transaction it would be trivial to verify it at any time in the future. It's verified forever basically.
Add on top that large private collections, museums and even private collectors would operate on the same database making the exchange of information significantly easier in situations like the large gifting my friend helped with.
I don't have a horse in this race really but I think it's undeniable that there's some innovation in the basic concept of a blockchain. Plus, it's just fun to think about an application like that. It's not going to magically solve all problems in this space but it does seem to fix some of the more annoying ones.
Oh, and of course there's a platform doing just this: https://www.artory.com/.