Banksy's art authentication system displays top-notch cryptographic nous

From what I can see in the illustration, there’s a long string of characters written right across the note before it’s torn, so it’s not just the edges of the tear that have to match, at least one character will be torn, so that has to match exactly as well.

meh. Nothing a bit of photoshopping and careful tearing can’t fix. Especially when the tear is not brand new anymore (or synthetically ‘worn’) it’s not too hard to make a plausible match. I have a street-magician friend who has an act hinging on the ‘uniqueness’ of a tear. He is very skilled in creating plausible copies of a tear.

the only real hurdle is the registry. But it would suffice to just assign a number to each artwork.

That wouldn’t sell as well though.

Trading_Places__One_dollar!%5B1%5D

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But what if the painting is on the side of your house? (eg) How do you send that in?
(More importantly, why/how did google maps highlight the particular artwork I was thinking of, without me searching for it?)

Weird coincidence department: a friend was telling me about this about 12 hours before the post went live.

I responded by wondering why it isn’t a public key instead of a private one.

Given the flightiness/humor/anonymity of the authenticator and the increasing value of the assets being authenticated, it feels like a public key is a lot more reliable/scalable.

This is not exactly a new idea.

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Most Banksy’s won’t be authenticated though. Look at the number in the edition of this one screenprint used as an example. The solution is to sell your fake Banksy as one the tens (or hundreds) of thousands of Banksys that haven’t been registered.

Now that it can, any savvy buyer will insist on it being authenticated.

People are kind of overthinking this. The artist or art collective has essentially offered a service to, for a fee, confirm whether or not they actually made the work of art in one’s possession and give one half of a private key which they or anyone buying can check with the other half on file with the artist’s service. Cryptographically it’s about as simple as it gets, but it only works because the artist is alive and apparently interested in exposing counterfeits.

Van Gogh would be a little harder to get in touch with, though I’m sure he’d be thrilled to know the art for which he died penniless and unappreciated has made great tangible asset investment vehicles for superyacht-owning robber barons. /s

The question is, how much do you trust Banksy?

My questions are different.

As a living artist creating financially valuable scarce art works, Banksy has a vested interest avoiding devaluation through counterfeiting. Pest Control itself may be a non-profit merely covering costs, but it provides a lucrative service not only to those seeking to trade genuine Banksy works of art, but to the artist. Through a combination of alleged talent (which I’m not even remotely qualified to critique), luck that the popular culture latched onto this artist out of all the talented artists that never garner fame, and mystique of their anonymity, Banksy effectively has a license to print money by selling their own authenticated art anonymously.

For all we know they take in only enough revenue to fund their projects, or they have patronage, but the point is we have no more way of being certain than we do of how much money oligarchs squirrel away in tax shelters. What we do know is that the financial incentive exists. Is the reputation of the artist available only through their work enough to guess their motives and whether they include profit? Which, if Banksy is motivated in part by profit, is fine by me. Artists should be paid. But I suspect most people have a different view of Banksy based more on their public image than any actual knowledge of the artist.

Even more interesting to me is whose name or names are on the incorporation documents, and whether or not they are in fact the artist.

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My faith in alphanumerical usernames and the ability of the entities they identify to spot pop culture references has been restored.

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What the fuck is cryptographic “nous”?

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Maybe a corruption of nonce?

Is this real, or is he trying to subvert the system? If I were him, I would “authenticate” anything and everything submitted and thus it becomes an Bansky through some transformative principle. I know there has been parallels drawn between his work and the Dada movement. Authenticating anything as art sounds right up his alley.

If he is actually only authenticating “real” stuff, then he is more or less perpetuating the art world he is supposed to be rebelling against. Then again, no highfalutin art world, nothing to rebel against. So I guess - job security?

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It seems significant that “original work of art” is in scare quotes on the certificate.

Common sense.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nous#Noun

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com-add-text

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Oh, I thought they just misspelled “noun” in the title.

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BANKSYCOIN is here.

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lmfao the idea of anyone who ships him 65 bucks and some goodwill art will get a certificate of authenticity would be pretty rich

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I think that’s the Royal Nous