"What we're hoping to do is raise awareness or define a new standard for fine art and collectibles... much like ISBN numbers are to books. This would be along the same lines."
Fine Art Registry president Terry Franks. The Web database, she says, is only part of the picture. When pieces are registered for 2.25, owners are sent holographic transparent tags... that leave evidence if they are tampered with...
"Order your tags, have them shipped to you, and then apply them to your pieces and complete the registration process on each piece. Which means the history of the piece if you have that, whether it's been appraised. What we're hoping is that all artists will start to register all of their pieces so we won't have questions thirty years from now as to who the artist was or whether it was done by for instance, Picasso. If he had this technology available to him, when he was at his hey day, and registered every piece... then we wouldn't have the fakes and forgeries we do today."
The site hopes to become a global tool as well for law enforcement to use to report and retrieve stolen art and valuables. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.