A Collector's Questions
What to ask of any digital work before you acquire it. The chain makes every answer checkable; your only task is to ask.
Who deployed the contract? (Chapter Eight.) The artist, or a platform? A contract deployed by the artist's own hand makes the studio part of the work. A platform contract is not disqualifying — much significant art lives in shared contracts — but you should know which you are buying, because in fifty years the difference will read loudly.
Whose address signed the mint? (Chapter Six.) Trace the token to its creation and look at the address that performed it. Is it the artist's — publicly claimed, consistently used, bound to their name? Or an intermediary's? This is the single question that separates signature provenance from every weaker kind. The origin should point at a person, not at infrastructure.
When was it minted, relative to its public life? (Chapters Six and Nine.) A work minted at or before its debut carries its whole life on-chain. A work minted long after it circulated — or lazy-minted at the moment of your purchase — has a prehistory the chain never witnessed. Know how much of the story the ledger actually holds.
Where does the work keep its moment, and where does it keep its body? (Chapters Eight and Twelve.) The record is on the chain; where is the art? Decentralized storage, the artist's own infrastructure, a platform's private servers, a live protocol? None of these is wrong in itself. What matters is whether the arrangement is deliberate — whether the artist can tell you, cleanly, what survives on its own and what must be tended.
What has the artist declared? (Chapters Six and Seven.) The chain proves the address; the artist's public life binds the address to the person. Has the artist claimed this work, this contract, this address, in the open, in the historical record? The strongest provenance is a chain plus a voice.
What are you prepared to steward? (Chapter Eleven, and Appendix B.) Before you hold the envelope, know what holding asks: the custody of your own keys, the continuity of what the token points to, the plan for the hands that come after yours. If you are not ready to be a good address, you are not ready to hold a moment.
Six questions. Every one answerable in minutes, by anyone, for as long as the record is kept — Appendix A walks through the checking, and Appendix C lists the patterns that should stop you. That sentence could not have been written at any other time in the history of art.