Artificial intelligence is changing the way images are created at an unprecedented speed.
Today, almost anyone can generate technically impressive images in seconds. As AI-generated content becomes increasingly common, I believe artists need to think beyond the image itself and start asking a different question:
What makes a physical artwork valuable when images are becoming almost infinitely reproducible?
One possible answer is provenance.
The history of an artwork, who created it, when it was created, who owned it, where it was exhibited and how it moved between collectors, cannot simply be generated by an image model.
This is where technologies such as NFC tags, digital certificates of authenticity and blockchain could become extremely interesting for independent artists.
Not because we need another NFT boom.
Quite the opposite.
I believe some of the most interesting applications of blockchain for artists may have very little to do with selling JPEGs.
They could be about giving physical artworks a persistent digital identity.
When an artist sells an original artwork, the collector will sometimes receive a Certificate of Authenticity, or COA.
Traditionally, this is a printed document containing information such as the artist’s name, artwork title, dimensions, medium, year, edition number and signature.
That is useful, but paper has obvious limitations.
Certificates can disappear. They can become separated from the artwork. They can be duplicated or modified. More importantly, once the artwork enters the secondary market, the artist often loses visibility of what happens next.
A collector might sell the piece five years later.
Then another collector might purchase it.
Eventually it might enter a gallery, collection or auction.
The artist may never know.
A digital certificate of authenticity creates an opportunity to build something more persistent: a record that can continue traveling with the artwork.
I am currently exploring this idea with a series of physical skateboard artworks.
My concept is relatively simple.
Each skateboard would contain an NFC tag connected to a unique page on my own website, Tokebi.net.
A collector could place a smartphone near the artwork and immediately open its digital certificate.
That page could contain information such as:
In other words, the NFC tag becomes a bridge between a physical object and its digital identity.
This isn’t purely theoretical. NFC-linked art authentication systems already exist, and academic research has demonstrated systems where NFC tags embedded in physical artworks connect smartphones to blockchain-based certificates of authenticity.
The important distinction is that the NFC tag itself does not prove authenticity.
It is simply an access point.
The value comes from the verified record behind it.
This is where blockchain becomes much more interesting.
Instead of thinking about an NFT as a collectible digital image, think about a blockchain token as the digital passport of a physical artwork.
For a unique artwork, an ERC-721 token can represent a unique record associated with that piece.
The artwork remains physical.
The blockchain record represents its identity and potentially its ownership history.
When I create a skateboard, for example, its digital record could be created at approximately the same time.
The first entry establishes its origin:
Created by TOKEBI → 2026 → Guatemala → Artwork #001.
When someone purchases it, ownership of the digital record could be transferred to the collector.
If that collector eventually sells the skateboard, the record could transfer again.
Over decades, this could create a transparent chain of provenance:
Artist → Collector A → Collector B → Gallery → Collector C.
Instead of reconstructing an artwork’s history twenty years later from receipts, emails and paper certificates, part of that history already exists as a timestamped digital record.
That is the part of blockchain technology that I find much more interesting than NFT speculation.
There is another important possibility: artist resale royalties.
Traditionally, an artist benefits financially from the initial sale of an artwork.
Imagine that I sell an original piece for $500.
Years later, my career develops and the collector sells it for $5,000.
Ten years later, it sells again for $20,000.
The increasing value was partially created by the artist’s continued career, exhibitions, reputation and cultural relevance.
Yet depending on the jurisdiction and transaction structure, the artist may receive nothing from those secondary sales.
Smart contracts introduce another model.
Standards such as ERC-2981 allow royalty information to be associated with NFT transactions. A system could specify, for example, that the creator should receive a percentage when a work is resold through a compatible transaction system.
There is an important limitation: blockchain royalty standards do not magically force every private buyer, gallery or marketplace in the world to pay an artist.
The transaction infrastructure must actually respect and execute those terms.
But the underlying concept is powerful.
A physical artwork could carry not only provenance, but also creator-defined economic rules associated with its digital counterpart.
Now take the concept further.
Someone encounters one of my skateboards ten years from now.
They tap the NFC tag.
Instead of seeing only a certificate saying TOKEBI — Original Artwork, they discover the object’s history.
Created in Guatemala in 2026.
Sold to its first collector.
Displayed at an exhibition in Los Angeles.
Transferred to another collector.
Exhibited again in Seoul.
Resold several years later.
The object now has a documented journey.
This is where provenance itself becomes part of the artwork’s value.
The system could potentially record ownership transfers, exhibitions, restoration or conservation events and other significant milestones. Research into blockchain-based provenance is already exploring precisely this type of permanent record keeping.
Of course, privacy matters.
A public provenance system doesn’t need to publish someone’s home address or even their real name. Ownership could be represented through wallets, pseudonymous collector profiles or selective disclosure.
The goal isn’t surveillance.
The goal is continuity.
Artificial intelligence makes this conversation increasingly relevant.
AI can generate millions of images.
It can imitate visual languages.
It can produce variations faster than any human artist could physically create them.
Trying to compete with AI purely on the quantity of images produced is probably a losing strategy.
Physical artists have another opportunity.
We can increase the importance of authorship, scarcity, provenance, physicality and history.
An AI system can generate an image that looks like a painting.
It cannot retroactively manufacture the genuine twenty-year journey of a physical object that was created, documented, exhibited, collected and transferred through a verifiable chain of events.
In fact, as synthetic media becomes more sophisticated, reliable provenance may become more valuable rather than less valuable.
We are already seeing concerns about AI being used not only to create images but also to fabricate supporting documentation around artworks.
A verifiable digital history can therefore become another layer of trust.
The NFT boom probably damaged the perception of blockchain technology among many artists.
Understandably so.
The conversation became dominated by speculation, cryptocurrency prices, profile pictures and marketplaces.
But blockchain is infrastructure.
An artist doesn’t necessarily need to sell “NFT art” to use it.
We could use blockchain to create permanent artwork records.
We could use NFC to connect physical objects with those records.
We could create digital certificates of authenticity.
We could document provenance.
We could create transferable ownership records.
We could experiment with resale royalties.
And we could potentially create a direct relationship between an artwork’s physical existence and its digital history.
That is a much more interesting proposition.
I don’t think technology should replace the physical artwork.
I think technology should document its journey.
For my own skateboard series, I am starting with something relatively simple: connecting each physical piece through NFC to its own certificate page on Tokebi.net.
Blockchain could become the next layer.
Ownership transfers could become another.
Automated or contractual resale royalties could come after that.
The important idea is not the token.
The artwork remains the artwork.
The technology simply gives the piece something physical art has historically struggled to maintain: a persistent, verifiable and transferable digital memory.
And perhaps, in an era when creating an image is becoming easier than ever, the history attached to an original object will become one of the things that makes owning real art even more valuable.
Written by TOKEBI, an independent visual artist exploring urban aesthetics and contemporary mythologies.
