Are you still looking for a gift for Valentine's Day?

This year, Vienna's Belvedere Museum has come up with something special: it is offering Gustav Klimt's "Kiss", created in 1908, for sale.

Rainer Hank

Freelance author in the business section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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In the 1970s, this kiss hung as a poster in many student rooms.

In the digital age, of course, it has to be digital.

NFT - "Non-Fungible Token" - is the magic word.

The painting is broken down into 10,000 digital sections that are supposed to be unique (not interchangeable, clearly identifiable, therefore "non-fungible").

One of these pieces of the puzzle costs 1850 euros, an arbitrary amount, the museum admits.

If the calculation works out, the end result will be income of 18.5 million euros.

The whole thing is a bit more complicated than ordering a bouquet of roses via Fleurop.

First you have to register on the "thekiss.art" platform.

It is then necessary for interested parties to create a "wallet" for the cryptocurrency ether.

This is not entirely trivial for non-digital natives.

I finally succeeded with the Meta-Mask app, there are good instructions on Youtube.

If more than 10,000 interested buyers register, the kiss pieces will be raffled.

You can be unlucky there.

It probably makes a small difference whether the partner gets a piece of the red kissing mouth at the end or just a section of the more boring floral decoration around it.

This could later be reflected in the price if you want to get rid of your Klimt,

This is how the NFT auction works

On Valentine's Day, i.e. on Monday, the "minting" takes place (the "minting").

In other words, then it will be clear whether I will be awarded a contract and which feat I can do.

I can also add a declaration of love online.

The certificates that each buyer receives show which section of the painting was purchased.

The initiators promise that resale is possible via a tradable NFT platform.

My Klimt is secured on the blockchain.

This is a database that is considered to be non-manipulable, inexpensive, fast and transparent, a kind of digital land register entry.

I wanted to understand the somewhat frivolous-sounding action better and contacted the law firm CMS in Austria, which advises the Belvedere.

The first thing I had to say goodbye to was that if I were to win the bid, I would unfortunately not become a co-owner of the original Klimt, but only of a high-resolution digital photograph, i.e. a copy of the painting.

No gold, just pixels.

I could have thought so too.

There is no Klimt for 18.5 million euros, whose portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was last sold for more than 100 million.

So it's like the prints in the dormitories - just more expensive and just a morsel.

There are also doubts as to whether the matter is really as safe from digital art forgers as the NFT enthusiasts promise.

One could describe the Belvedere campaign as a kind of museum merchandising.

The older ones buy coffee mugs with the Klimt kiss on them, the younger ones buy NFT.

NFTs open up new financing opportunities for museums, many of which are no longer able to bid in view of the record prices on the art market.

The digital art world is growing exponentially, to $17 billion worldwide, as Goldman Sachs thought it knew last October.

At Christie's last year, an online auction of digital collages fetched nearly $70 million.

Is this the future of the art market?

Now I'm not sure if I should apply for the kiss.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the Belvedere gag disavows the entire tokenization.

The basic idea behind this is how to divide property rights in one thing between several without dividing the thing: illiquid should become liquid.

The economic historian Alfred Chandler showed in the 1960s that this was exactly the idea of ​​the corporation.

The owners of a company can exchange their shares several times a day depending on supply and demand at market and stock exchange prices without the factory having to be broken up.

Possibly even without the employees or even the top management noticing anything: They are supposed to be working.

What works for factories should now also be possible for art, manuscripts, real estate or forests.

Digitization makes it possible to democratize assets.

In this way, the still very archaic, elitist, opaque art market is becoming a “normal” asset class.

With small amounts - well, 1850 euros is not very small - I can become an art speculator.

Theodor Weimer, CEO of Deutsche Börse, has had a nose for the potential of tokenization for a long time.

Weimer brings me together with Carlo Kölzer, a successful start-up entrepreneur.

The stock exchange (along with Commerzbank) has a 50 percent stake in his company 360x.

You have to imagine the company as a “conglomerate” made up of a large art gallery (with art historical expertise, quality assurance, provenance information, protection against counterfeiters) and a connected digital marketplace.

Confidence-building measures under the umbrella of the reputable exchange to implement a financial innovation.

If it works, rich art collectors will post their works (real or digital) here and have parts of them tokenized.

In the end, these are perhaps investment alternatives to my stock ETF, which are currently not very enjoyable.