The rights to a performance art piece have been tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain.
HOW ARE WE, a performance art collaboration consisting of 15 short works filmed in COVID-19 quarantine, has been hashed and minted into a non-fungible token on the Ethereum blockchain.
Additionally, a mechanism has been put in place to reward the project’s contributors whenever the asset is sold.
Artists benefit from potentially appreciating assets
A legally binding contract grants the rights to the film to the holder of the ERC-721 token in which the hash and metadata of the artwork is stored. This means that if, for instance, the Museum of Modern Art wanted to purchase the piece, it would first need to acquire an Ethereum wallet.
Additional tokens have been minted and distributed between the contributors to the film. If somebody buys the piece, the proceeds will be split based on the percentage holdings of these additional tokens.
For any further sales, 10% of the sale price will go directly back to the original artists. Any fan donations sent to an Ethereum address will also be split between contributors.
HOW ARE WE’s head of blockchain technology, Rob Solomon explained the idea behind the project, which was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation.
“Digital art forms have exploded in recent decades. Technology enables today’s artists to mix otherworldly music, draw up complex illustrations, and produce impossibly augmented films … While we’ve dramatically advanced the means by which art is created and shared, we’ve yet to adequately advance the means by which legitimacy is proven and artists can own, and be compensated for, their work.”
