How not to buy forged or stolen art!

Art is present since the dawn of time, documenting and celebrating Humanity´s achievements and lifestyle!
One of the earliest form of Art in existence, is the cave paintings, drawn possibly by early Homo-Sapiens, 35,000 years ago, in the caves of the District of Maros, located in South Sulawesi in Indonesia. That portraits Animals, possibly as a way to register the spices they hunted and dealt with or just as a decoration for their homes!

"Art Provenance - (From the French Provenir, to come from / forth), is the chronology of the ownership, custody, or location of a Historical Object."
Wikipédia

Knowing the Provenance of an object, is essential to the Art Comunity around the world, as it helps assess if the piece in question is the real Work or simply a clever imitation or high-quality forgery, to see if the seller is the rightful owner, sales representative or a thief and black market dealer. This by taking in to account the previous owners and their sale location, a real Piece can be distinguished from its forgery or copy (together with other traces of evidence).

A Piece Ownership will always bring up the question;
"Where did you buy this from?"

Question, still left to be answered by several museums in Europe and around the world, regarding acquisition of art pieces made before and during the II World War (1933 - 1945), as records of its provenance are unclear and somewhat of a controversial topic around Museum curators and their academic communities, due to records that went missing or reported lost in odd accidents, during times of inquiry of its Provenances.

ARTEX.GLOBAL is the largest holding photo media in Russia and the Commonwealth Independent States (Russia C.I.S.). They are in the Photographic market since 2002, with an overall audience of more than one million visitors each month, previously held one hundred expositions and festivals, with the attendance of over 80,000 people.
Received one of the largest Photo Awards in the World, the 35awards.com, and whit a subscriber database of over 800,000 people.

ARTEX.GLOBAL intends to go even beyond, by implementing a Blockchain as a system of registry, to document and integrate an immutable, uncensorable and whit ZERO downtime service, that will safeguard, with the help of elected experts, the authenticity, and provenance of an art piece. Will use the blockchain technology to record the Prof of Intellect and the prof of Concept (Authors Rights and current owner of the piece in question).

"Examining Digital Art"
by: Miguel Prestrelo

The creation of Development labs specialized and authorized by ARTEX.GLOBAL for printing a limited number of authentic prints, will be a personal endeavor that a Photographer with own lab would achieve in order to propel its business and safeguard his copyright, as one of the goals of the system is to save trips to courthouses for the Artist to record and prove his own Author rights, that sometimes come out quite expensive and exhaustive!

The platform will bring forth the following benefits:

• It will provide an aggregated Record of each Art Work Transaction, providing a database for the new buyer of the pieces previous owners.
• Creation of a Unified but Decentralized registry for the Authentication of an Artwork using the Blockchain Technology, achieving a unified history for each piece of Art, eliminating any possibility of forgeries.
• The secure process, Safe Deal, will be governed by a Smart Contract to maintain reliable transactions, with this payment service, the client's money will only be delivered after the terms of the transaction are complete.
• The restriction on the circulation of Digital Art Work. Authentication is achieved with the formation of narrowly defined groups.
• Copyright protection for Photographers, Courts will accept the records that are confirmed by a Blockchain system. Reducing legal expenses, unlawful duplications and will legally protect the artist.
• Monetization of Knowledge, Artex will help experts ( Art Historians, crítics, Gallery owners, professional photographers) to monetize their knowledge and abilities.

The ARTEX.GLOBAL ICO will be running from 5th of December until the 27th of December 2017.
There will be three token cap goals to achieve, the Tech-Cap of $3 000 000 USD a Soft-Cap of $7 500 000 USD to a Hard-Cap of $15 000 000 USD, all of which will count for a successful ICO for a Art Provenance Blockchain that may be well established within the Art Communities and the mainstream around the world, in less than no time at all!

LucidChart by: fdeabreu2u

Each token will be sold for 100 - 130 ART Tokens for every $1 USD invested (subject to changes due to ETH / USD Fluctuation on the Exchange rate.), there will be Bonus Token on purchases that will vary from 3% to 20% more tokens on purchases made from $1000 to $100 000 USD.

LucidChart by: fdeabreu2u

The use of a Smart-wallet is required, as the crowdsale will be held in an Ethereum Eco-system that run on Smart-contracts. Do not invest using an Ethereum address from an Exchange, use only ERC-20 ERC-223 Token compliant Ethereum Smart-Wallet, as Tokens will pay out future dividends that are Governed by a Smart-Contract.

Hope you didn´t mind, reading it on Steemit!

ARTEX.GLOBAL Whitepaper
https://artex.global/files/artexwp-eng.pdf

ARTEX.GLOBAL platform v.0.1
https://mvp.artex.global/
https://artex.global/

Sources and Inspiration:
Roque, Maria Isabel, "O mercado da arte em Portugal durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial," in a.muse.arte , 2017/01/19, https://amusearte.hypotheses.org/1701.
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arte_rupestre
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estado_da_arte
http://www.artbusiness.com/provwarn.html
https://artex.global/files/artexwp-eng.pdf
https://artex.global/