Tech startup trying to catalogue every piece of artwork in existence

Washington

IS IT possible to digitise and verify every art object ever made? Verisart, a new site co-founded by Robert Norton, previously chief executive officer of two online art-commerce sites, Saatchi Online and Sedition, is going to try.

The digital startup hopes to chronicle original artworks, prints, multiples and books by using block chain, thereby assigning each object a (hopefully) unassailable certificate of authenticity. Each object's provenance, in turn, is created step-by-step by its owners, who add their e-mail addresses to an object's data when they purchase one.