Several estates of artists, including those of the Picasso and Magritte families, called on Thursday in a forum for the booming NFT market to be built “in respect” of copyright.
“The eruption of NFTs on the art market has sparked speculation on an unprecedented scale in recent months. All over the world, many operators have embarked, often in haste, on initiatives aiming to offer for sale works, new or pre-existing, attached to these digital tokens recorded in the blockchain”, write nearly twenty estates of artists, including big names in world contemporary art.
However, they continue, the marketing of some of these NFTs is done “often without the assistance of the artist or his heirs”.
“It is important that market players keep in mind the basic rules of law that apply to them, at the risk of seeing their liability engaged (…) any reproduction and any communication to the public of a work of art , whether partial or total, can only take place with the consent of the artist or his successors in title”, they insist.
Thus, more than “a thousand fraudulent works and counterfeits have been removed from NFT sales platforms”, in recent months specifies the press release from ADAGP (French Society for the collection and distribution of copyright in the field of graphic and plastic arts), also a signatory of the forum.
To do this, these successions of artists and ADAGP have launched a website. Objective? To facilitate requests for NFT creations (NFT-artists-rights.com).
Among the signatories of the platform: the Le Corbusier Foundation, the Yves Klein archives, the Lempicka estate or the Miro estate.
Non-fungible tokens or NFTs have been around for several years but interest in them increased in 2021 with several high-profile sales, including that in December 2021 of the artist’s work Beeple which sold 69 .3 million in the United States.
After years of hesitation, auction houses and galleries have entered this new market. However, this boom upsets the traditional codes of validation of what a work of art is.
© AFP
