On 5 July 2022, Claudio Francesconi was invited to testify before the VII Committee on Culture, Science and Education of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, as part of a parliamentary inquiry into the use of digital certificates of uniqueness (Non-Fungible Tokens – NFTs) in art.
The hearing represented one of the early institutional discussions in Italy specifically addressing the relationship between NFTs, blockchain, digital art and the art market, at a time when these technologies were rapidly changing the ways in which digital artworks could be produced, authenticated, circulated and collected.
Drawing on his professional experience in both the art market and the digital field, Francesconi examined the NFT phenomenon and its potential role within the contemporary art system. His contribution addressed the relationship between the artwork and its digital certificate, questions of uniqueness and ownership in the digital environment, blockchain as an infrastructure for authentication, and the transformations these technologies were introducing into the relationship between artists, collectors and the market.
The hearing took place at a particularly significant moment in the recent history of digital art. Following the extraordinary international expansion of the NFT market between 2020 and 2021, the phenomenon was beginning to attract the attention of public institutions, moving beyond the predominantly financial and speculative narratives that had characterised much of the public debate.
The parliamentary inquiry therefore sought to examine the broader cultural, economic and technological implications of a technology that had introduced something previously difficult to implement on a large scale: the possibility of associating a digital artwork with a transferable and publicly verifiable certificate recorded on a blockchain.
The discussion consequently raises a question whose relevance extends well beyond the NFT phenomenon itself: what does it mean to own, authenticate and collect an artwork in the age of digital reproducibility?
Four years later, the recording also serves as a document of a specific moment in the evolution of digital art and of its gradual emergence as a subject of cultural and institutional debate in Italy.
Claudio Francesconi
Italian Chamber of Deputies – VII Committee on Culture, Science and Education
Rome, 5 July 2022
