In what sense does a Token give you any ownership over any part of the image? If someone does a copy&paste operation and starts selling "your" image on a t-shirt, does your NFT give you any way to stop them?
I can go to the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa. That doesn't mean I own the Mona Lisa.
Let's say you go to Sotheby's and you buy Van Gogh's Starry Night at auction. Along with the actual painting, you'd get a certificate of authenticity showing the provenance of the work. Basically, a record showing everyone who owned it before you and certifying that this is, in fact, the real Starry Night that Van Gogh painted. The real value of the painting is not in the painting itself, but in that certificate proving that it's the real original. If you tried to sell the painting without it, you wouldn't get many buyers. There's lots of people who could paint an exact replica of Starry Night, but there's still only one real Starry Night. Likewise, anyone can make a copy of a piece of digital art, but there's only one NFT, and if you don't have the NFT in your crypto wallet, you don't actually own it.
So, think of it as a certificate of authenticity for digital artworks, although it can be used to represent ownership of other things as well, if people agreed to it. It can also do neat things like transfer a portion of the sale price back to the original artist every time it's sold, which isn't currently done with regular artworks.
Not true. Banksy sold a painting for $1.4 million and it shredded itself right after the auction ended. Three years later the shredded remains (presumably with the certificate of authenticity) sold for $25.4 million[1]. So, no, the value is not in an intact painting.
Forgers can artificially age paintings. It's amazing the lengths they go to. Maybe something like Starry Night has been analyzed enough that it could be verified, but other works are not. It's not really known how many works of art on the market are forgeries.
> No one would want to buy the certificate from you but let you keep the painting in your vaults
Actually people do this all the time. They pay millions upon millions of dollars for a work of art and it gets loaned to a museum and possibly sent all over the world. They still own it though. There's also freeports[2] around the world with warehouses full of art. You can buy an artwork and it never moves from the warehouse, just the record of who owns it changes.
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/10/14/shredded-banksy-artwork-could-...
The value of art is art. If we disagree then you are admitting that both the art world and crypto are heavily used for money laundering.
Neither of those are necessary for the blockchain because nobody can assert ownership of the blockchain tokens without the private keys to your wallet.
Contrast with a token in your wallet on the blockchain. As long as your private keys are secure, nobody else but you can transfer that token anywhere else. Nobody else can convincingly represent that they are the owner of it. The blockchain proves irrefutably that you own it. The blockchain, as represented by the consensus of thousands of nodes, is the ultimate authority of who owns what on that blockchain.