AABC, Blockchain and the Future of Provenance: A Conversation with Silvia Stabile on Inside Art
For Silvia Stabile's ARTech Law column on Inside Art, I sat down for a long conversation about AABC, the Art & Antiquities Blockchain Consortium, and the work it is doing at the intersection of technology, law, and cultural heritage.
AABC, founded by Susan de Menil, brings together lawyers, technologists, curators, restorers, and scholars around a clear premise: blockchain and adjacent technologies can be applied to some of the oldest questions in the field, from provenance to restitution, from authentication to the long arc of cultural ownership. The consortium designs frameworks and stewardship models that cultural institutions can actually adopt.
Silvia Stabile frames the conversation around how technology, paired with serious legal and curatorial thinking, becomes real infrastructure for the cultural sector, rather than a layer of novelty placed on top of it. Blockchain, smart contracts, tokenized certificates, AI for provenance research and image recognition: these are starting to find concrete shape in museums, foundations, and collecting institutions, and AABC is one of the most serious places where that work is being tested.
I have been collaborating with AABC on its strategic partnership with prof Andrea Rurale at SDA Bocconi School of Management, focused on innovative frameworks for the restitution and circulation of artworks of uncertain provenance in Italy. It is a project that sits squarely on the questions Silvia and Susan are working through, and one of the reasons this conversation is so relevant right now.
Technology becomes infrastructure for the cultural sector when it gets paired with serious legal and curatorial thinking.
Read the full conversation on Inside Art / ARTech Law: https://insideart.eu/2026/05/07/art-antiquities-blockchain-consortium-la-tecnologia-a-servizio-dellarte/
