From Object to Protocol: How Art Becomes an Informational Entity
An essay by Ulvi Kasimov, Founder of the .ART Registry
Elton John's photography collection is considered one of the largest in the world. It holds more than seven thousand works, from portraits of film stars to images that became part of the history of the twentieth century. Among them are Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, Eve Arnold's photographs of Marilyn Monroe on the Nevada set of The Misfits, and documentary images from the civil rights movement and the fight against AIDS. It all began with Man Ray's Glass Tears: in 1993 the singer bought the print for $193,895, then a record sum for a photograph. A poster of the same image had hung on Elton John's wall in his youth.
Over time the collection grew so large that the singer turned his apartment in Atlanta into a home museum, hanging the walls with photographs from floor to ceiling. He joked that one day he would "die in bed, crushed by a falling Man Ray." Today, part of the collection can be seen in Paris: the exhibition Fragile Beauty at the Jeu de Paume brings together more than 300 photographs, including works by Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon.
The story is telling because it shows how a private collection stops being a set of objects and becomes something else, a network of names, prices, references, curatorial decisions and cultural memory. Each photograph in Elton John's collection is not only what is printed on it. It is also a chain of provenance, a history of exhibitions, a relationship to the rest of the collection, an audit trail of insurance policies and auction lots. This is not exceptional; it is the general condition of art today.
The art world has long ceased to live in a world of things; it lives in a world of agreements. The certificate of authenticity, which consultants and bankers cite with such confidence, is only the visible layer of a more fundamental process: the transformation of the work of art from an object into an informational entity. A painting, a sculpture, an installation no longer exists on its own. Its authenticity, its value and even its meaning are held together by a network of data, contracts, authorial formulas, legal permissions, institutional replications and market records. Matter now carries value; it no longer generates it. In Dirk Boll's economic terminology, a work is a commodity with two interdependent quantities, the aesthetic and the financial. Their ratio is regulated by consensus rather than by the eye: by the sum of interpretations, institutional appraisals and digital traces.
Matter now carries value; it no longer generates it.
The paradox is that the "certificate of authenticity" itself can no longer guarantee anything. It may describe layers of paint or provenance, but it fails to capture the logic by which a work exists. Art lives in the protocols that make the canvas readable: in the chain of ownership, in the digital trail, in the reproduction rights, in the context of museum policy and the algorithms of the auction floor. Authenticity becomes a function of data transparency rather than of a personal expert's promise. Boll writes that objective value does not exist in art; what remains is a subjective decision expressed through a willingness to pay. Today that willingness is fuelled less by "quality of execution" than by density of information: the volume of connections, references, citations, transactions and ratings, everything that makes a work visible in the networked economy.
A century ago Duchamp first marked this shift. By declaring a ready-made object to be art, he turned a gesture into a protocol and an act into a data structure. His Fountain exists not in the ceramic but in the events around it: in the scandal, in Stieglitz's photograph, in museum reconstructions, in the articles and disputes. Each new replica is an updated record in the network of meanings, not a forgery. Cattelan, in the twenty-first century, pushed this logic to its market conclusion: buying his Comedian, a collector receives an instruction and a certificate, not a banana. Matter is replaceable; the work lives in the contract and in the memory of the media landscape, where every scandal and meme adds to its informational mass. Irony becomes a currency, and the archive a bank of value.
Irony becomes a currency, and the archive a bank of value.
The contemporary market has institutionalised this shift. The digitisation of auctions and museums, the digitisation of collections, NFT platforms and algorithmic valuations have moved art's centre of gravity into the informational layer. Boll observes that quality of execution has ceased to be the measure of artistic merit; the "idea" has taken its place as the key variable. Artificial intelligence and databases already participate in the creation and attribution of works. Algorithms like MosAIc compare the collections of the Metropolitan and the Rijksmuseum, automating the work of curators and appraisers; text models draft catalogue entries; NFT markets experiment with new forms of ownership. In this way a new infrastructure of trust is being formed: an economy of metadata rather than an economy of things.
Museums are rebuilding themselves too. They are becoming nodes of knowledge rather than repositories, where value is measured by the quality of description and the coherence of data, not by the number of objects held. Their policy shifts from possession to openness: deaccession, restitution, digital twins and open APIs are all decided at the level of protocols rather than vitrines. In this logic, the "digital twin" is the systemic shell of the original, not its replacement. It gathers everything that keeps the work alive: geometry, ownership history, legal regime, insurance records, market telemetry. In the right data architecture, the twin becomes the body of the work's informational identity, a body that outlives any physical carrier.
What was once called the "certificate" is now a vestige of this structure. It records a signature but not the ecosystem of data around it. A signature severed from its context no longer guarantees authenticity.
Alfred Stieglitz's 1917 photograph of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, shown alongside Stieglitz's own self-portrait from around 1907. The original urinal was lost soon after the scandal at the Society of Independent Artists. That photograph became the artwork. A century later, museums, articles and every replica still trace themselves back to it: one of the first cases in which the existence of a work lives in its documentation.
Art demands systems in which information is transparent and coordinated, not paper. True authenticity is the consistency of every layer: the semantic (ideas), the procedural (instructions), the network (institutions), the market (price history), the legal (regimes of ownership) and the sensory (data on condition). When these layers are connected, the work exists; when they are torn apart, only a mute thing remains.
The conversation about the certification of art should therefore move into a conversation about protocols: about data schemas rather than stamps, about validation rather than guarantors, about the honesty of infrastructure rather than the fear of forgery. Art increasingly resembles science or code: value is defined by reproducibility. A century ago the workshop gave way to the conceptualist's office; today the office becomes a server, where the data on which the work depends is stored. We live in an era in which the Mona Lisa is not a painting but an extremely expensive package of information. What matters is not how much paint sits on the canvas but how precise and coherent its informational biography is. And whoever controls that biography controls not only the price but the very meaning of art.
The question is not whether the shift is happening, but which infrastructure will define it.
It is in this perspective that the .ART domain zone reveals itself as more than infrastructure for digital addresses; it is a laboratory for a new era in art and culture. It creates a universal protocol of identity in which works, authors, institutions and collections receive verifiable digital "names" and connections. .ART becomes a space in which value is reproduced through data rather than proclaimed: certificates, digital twins, links to objects, ownership history, metadata and context. What was once secured by the auction house or the gallery is now recorded as a networked standard of trust. In this sense .ART sits at the vanguard: it does not sell addresses, it builds the language in which culture will speak of itself in the new, informational era.
