The art world is a social game played by rich people who want valuable objects. Art is used as a store of value and conspicuous wealth, and to show that the own

The art world is a social game played by rich people who want valuable objects. Art is used as a store of value and conspicuous wealth, and to show that the owner is someone who can afford to pay for an artist's time. You can't do that with a digital file that can be reprinted and copied ad lib. But you can try. There's a new project which uses the blockchain to deal with the issue of provenance, so that art world people can be sure that their copy of a digital file is the valuable one that matters. This is useless madness. It's using a 21st century technology to solve a 19th century problem. But it's run by art world people who used to work at big auction houses, and they're not thinking about art like normal people do.