Notes
Chapter One
"the largest organized theft of art in history" (and Chapter One): on Nazi-era art looting and postwar restitution, see Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (1994); Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum (1997).
"catalogues raisonnés": on the history of provenance as a discipline, see Gail Feigenbaum and Inge Reist, eds., Provenance: An Alternate History of Art (Getty Research Institute, 2012).
Chapter Two
"Han van Meegeren's forgeries of Vermeer": Jonathan Lopez, The Man Who Made Vermeers (2008). Van Meegeren was arrested in 1945; the trial concluded in 1947.
"every work of art is a performance": Denis Dutton, "Artistic Crimes: The Problem of Forgery in the Arts," British Journal of Aesthetics 19, no. 4 (1979).
"the Salvator Mundi": Ben Lewis, The Last Leonardo (2019). The 2005 purchase price is widely reported as $1,175 at a New Orleans estate auction; this book prints the more conservative "less than $10,000." The sale: Christie's New York, November 15, 2017, $450,312,500 including fees.
"John Drewe... corrupted the archives themselves": Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo, Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art (2009).
Chapter Three
"a Louise Nevelson wall sculpture... pulled days before the sale": the sculpture, consigned by the estate of collector Hardie Beloff with a 1998 document from the Nevelson estate certifying it as the artist's work, was withdrawn from Sotheby's in May 2022 after Arne Glimcher of Pace Gallery — Nevelson's primary dealer during her lifetime — told the auction house it had been assembled by the artist's son from authentic Nevelson components. The Beloff estate sued Pace in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania; most claims were dismissed, but a wrongful-interference claim survived as of 2025. See "Pace Gallery Sued Over Nevelson Sculpture Pulled From Sotheby's Auction," ARTnews, and "From Pollocks to NFTs: The 12 Cases That Shaped Art Litigation in 2025," ARTnews, 2025.
"Judith and Holofernes... came to market in Toulouse": discovered in a Toulouse attic in 2014 and declared a national treasure by France in 2016, the painting divided specialists between Caravaggio and his Flemish follower Louis Finson; the state declined to purchase, with uncertainty about the attribution as the stated reason, and the export restriction lapsed in late 2018. The scheduled auction of June 27, 2019 was cancelled two days beforehand when the work sold privately to a foreign buyer at an undisclosed price — reported to be the collector J. Tomilson Hill. See Alex Greenberger, "Caravaggio Painting Estimated at $170 M. Sold Privately Ahead of Auction in France," ARTnews, June 25, 2019.
"the Knoedler Gallery... closed": Knoedler closed in November 2011; the forgery scheme (works sold as Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell, and others, painted by Pei-Shen Qian and supplied through Glafira Rosales) was litigated through the 2010s. See contemporaneous reporting and the documentary Made You Look (2020).
"the Andy Warhol Foundation dissolved its authentication board": announced October 2011, effective 2012, citing litigation costs. The Jean-Michel Basquiat authentication committee dissolved in 2012.
Chapter Four
"In 2009, Bitcoin introduced": Satoshi Nakamoto, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" (whitepaper, October 2008); network launch January 3, 2009.
"In 2015, Ethereum expanded the concept": Vitalik Buterin, "Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform" (whitepaper, 2013–14); mainnet launch July 30, 2015.
Chapter Five
"The DAO... forked the chain": the DAO exploit of June 2016 and the hard fork of July 20, 2016, producing the ETH/ETC split.
"Kevin McCoy minted a work called Quantum": Quantum, minted on Namecoin, May 2014; demonstrated with Anil Dash as "monetized graphics" at Rhizome's Seven on Seven, New Museum, May 2014. See Anil Dash, "NFTs Weren't Supposed to End Like This," The Atlantic (April 2021). On the Namecoin record's lapse and the disputed 2021 sale: Quantum sold in Sotheby's Natively Digital online sale, concluding June 10, 2021, for $1,472,000, as an Ethereum token minted by McCoy in 2021 to carry the original 2014 record forward; the competing claim to the lapsed Namecoin entry was litigated as Free Holdings Inc. v. McCoy et al., U.S. District Court, S.D.N.Y., dismissed 2023.
"Spells of Genesis... began issuing trading cards in March 2015": EverdreamSoft (Geneva; founder Shaban Shaame). The first card, FDCARD, was issued on Bitcoin's Counterparty protocol on March 11, 2015, in partnership with FoldingCoin, and distributed between March 13 and May 26, 2015 to participants donating computing power to Stanford's Folding@home disease-research program; 300 were created. The cards predate the game itself, which launched in 2017. See EverdreamSoft, "Introducing the FDCARD" (Medium, 2015), and the official card documentation at docs.spellsofgenesis.com.
"Etheria... launched in October 2015": created by Cyrus Adkisson; the original version was deployed October 19, 2015, roughly three months after Ethereum's mainnet launch, and demonstrated live at DEVCON1 in London in November 2015. A 33×33 map of hexagonal tiles, 457 of them purchasable and tradable per version; eleven sold in 2015, and the rest went unclaimed until the rediscovery of March 13, 2021, when the remaining tiles sold within days. A candor the lineage requires: several versions of Etheria were deployed in 2015, and after the rediscovery the question of which contract is canonical was itself disputed — the Quantum lesson, which record is the work?, repeating on a second chain. See Decrypt, "An NFT Game Almost Old as Ethereum Just Resurfaced" (March 14, 2021), and the project's documentation at etheria.world.
"CryptoPunks, in June 2017": Larva Labs (Matt Hall and John Watkinson), June 2017.
"CryptoKitties, on the same day": Dapper Labs, launched late November 2017.
"Aspen V" minted November 23, 2017, 02:01:12 UTC
(contract 0xD2680aF5D4129198B3DC4C851c99de14Fce36358;
tx 0xdb94a7cae144af3e515bd8937de852bde9e95c0a2638323373aeb5e6d24efefb); CryptoKitties Core deployed November 23, 2017, 05:41:19 UTC
(contract 0x06012c8cf97BEaD5deAe237070F9587f8E7A266d;
tx 0x691f348ef11e9ef95d540a2da2c5f38e36072619aa44db0827e1b8a276f120f4).
"the token standard... ERC-721": EIP-721, proposed January 2018 (William Entriken, Dieter Shirley, Jacob Evans, Nastassia Sachs).
"block timestamp" (and Chapter Six, "recorded by the network itself"): block timestamps are set by the block's producer within a small protocol tolerance, historically on the order of seconds; throughout this book, timestamps are the ledger's recorded values.
Chapter Six
"Nelson Goodman drew a distinction": Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (1968), chapter III, "Art and Authenticity."
Chapter Seven
"first publicly connected to the name Verdandi" (December 15, 2017, 20:05:33 UTC): the claiming artifact is itself on-chain. At that timestamp, a token contract named ASPEN - By Artist Verdandi (token symbol ASPEN-DAT) was deployed at 0x886844Fd66957A02F17B1f4d076d0223Ad6110Af — the artist's name embedded in the permanent record of the deployment; the deploying address is readable in the contract's creation transaction at that page (https://etherscan.io/address/0x886844Fd66957A02F17B1f4d076d0223Ad6110Af). For independent documentation of the project, this contract, and this exact timestamp, see Adam McBride, "Rediscovered 2017 NFT Art Project," Medium, November 2021 (https://adamamcbride.medium.com/rediscovered-2017-nft-art-project-587fcffecda2).
"the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts": San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, "San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts Acquires First NFT Artworks for its Collection," press release, San Angelo, Texas, 2022 (contacts Howard Taylor and Laura Huckaby). The phrase quoted in the text — "the first digital artworks in the collection" — appears verbatim in the release, which also records the display dates (July 14 – September 11, 2022), the dual accession (a signed paper deed of gift alongside the on-chain transfer, with both paper and digital files kept), and the museum's description of TEST as minted as a .DAT, "digital art token," before the term "NFT" was in use. Curator Laura Huckaby called the works "an important record of the time and place in which we live."
"I registered the copyright": VERDANDI, U.S. Copyright Registration number: VAu 1-334-830, Registration Date: February 20, 2018
Chapter Nine
"a CryptoPunk "sold" for 124,457 ETH": CryptoPunk 9998, October 28, 2021. On-chain analysis (notably by Robert Miller of Flashbots) traced the flash loans — principally from Compound, with additional borrowing via dYdX and MakerDAO — the circular payment between the two addresses, and the token's return to its origin; Larva Labs, the project's creator, publicly confirmed that the buyer had purchased the Punk from themselves with borrowed funds repaid in the same transaction, and struck the sale from its records. See coverage of October 28–29, 2021 in Bloomberg ("CryptoPunk 9998 NFT Sale for $532 Million of Ethereum Wasn't What It Appeared"), Decrypt, and The Block.
"endemic in the boom years": for scale, see Chainalysis, "Crime and NFTs" preview of its 2022 Crypto Crime Report (blog post, February 2022): blockchain analysis identified 262 users who had sold NFTs to self-financed addresses more than 25 times; the 110 profitable ones collectively took nearly $8.9 million from the practice — most likely, Chainalysis notes, from buyers who believed the price histories were real — while the most prolific had made 830 such self-sales. The firm cautioned that the method captures only the most overt cases, since sophisticated actors use fresh addresses. Subsequent peer-reviewed work found that on marketplaces whose token rewards paid users to trade, wash trades constituted the large majority of reported volume (Niu et al., 2024, reporting 94.5% on LooksRare and 84.2% on X2Y2); see also von Wachter et al., "NFT Wash Trading: Quantifying Suspicious Behaviour in NFT Markets" (2022).
"Rare Pepe cards, issued on Bitcoin's Counterparty protocol beginning in 2016": Counterparty launched 2014; the first Rare Pepe cards date to September 2016.
"Beeple's Everydays": Everydays: The First 5000 Days, Christie's online sale concluding March 11, 2021; $69,346,250.
Chapter Ten
"Walter Benjamin... in 1935": "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," written 1935, first published 1936. His foundational distinction between "cult value" and "exhibition value" appears in section V of the widely read translation by Harry Zohn, found in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).
Chapter Twelve
"its transition to proof-of-stake in 2022": "The Merge," September 15, 2022.