Forgeries have been a thing yes. And many were so good that they fooled (and continue to fool) some of the foremost experts on particular types of art/artists, for years and years. And then an advance in a technique may mean the forgery is unmasked many years later.
For a moment, let's leave aside digital art (NFT's have a role there). There is no way at all that an NFT can be reasonably "tethered" to a specific physical object in order to prove its authenticity. None as far as I understand it.
Therefore, what's to stop me from creating a forgery a decade later (say for some art that's disappeared into a private collection), and claiming that the NFT relates to that? How does the NFT prove anything at all other than at a point in time, the actual artist used a digital signature to sign a ... a what? How do you create a digital representation of a physical object that you can tie to a specific object? It's not the signing that does it. And if we knew the answer, we wouldn't need NFT's in the first place.
Let's say that the thing that the NFT signs, is a document of the provenance of the physical art. So? Experts get it wrong and provenance can be faked. The best thing that we've got that authenticates the physical art is the analysis and expertise that goes into its assessment - even though those assessments are occasionally wrong. They can in future be corrected. What does an NFT add to this?
For a moment, let's leave aside digital art (NFT's have a role there). There is no way at all that an NFT can be reasonably "tethered" to a specific physical object in order to prove its authenticity. None as far as I understand it.
Therefore, what's to stop me from creating a forgery a decade later (say for some art that's disappeared into a private collection), and claiming that the NFT relates to that? How does the NFT prove anything at all other than at a point in time, the actual artist used a digital signature to sign a ... a what? How do you create a digital representation of a physical object that you can tie to a specific object? It's not the signing that does it. And if we knew the answer, we wouldn't need NFT's in the first place.
Let's say that the thing that the NFT signs, is a document of the provenance of the physical art. So? Experts get it wrong and provenance can be faked. The best thing that we've got that authenticates the physical art is the analysis and expertise that goes into its assessment - even though those assessments are occasionally wrong. They can in future be corrected. What does an NFT add to this?