[duped]

I think you miss the forest for the trees in my comment, which is attacking the semantics of "ownership" of a digital asset, which in blockchains corresponds to "the ability to give ownership to someone else" - or the only kind of ownership that a blockchain provides is the ability for one person to transfer the ownership.

For some assets like currency this is sufficient - currency is only valuable by virtue of the fact it can be transferred.

For art it is not sufficient, since ownership must also cover the ability to be transferred and the ability to view the artwork.

While all of it is a social construct, the semantics of those constructs are very different. My argument here is that blockchains and smart contracts are not sufficient to represent ownership beyond its transfer, which makes it useless as a mechanism to define ownership for assets that need to be more than transferred.

[mattdesl]

Perhaps this is a narrow view of ownership that will be expanded by NFTs (or, perhaps not - let’s see in a couple years).

I don’t see it all that different than purchasing and therefore owning a conceptual Sol LeWitt artwork, ie: a few written instructions on a scrap of paper, that (eg: if it is lost) can be simply re-written to restore the work.

Your requirements (ability to transfer and view an artwork) are met by many on-chain projects, eg: see Autoglyphs.