On the fifth of September 2025 I won a painting at auction. Sacred Layers, number nine in a series called Gradient Horizons. Terraced hills out of the Andes, Inca suns, textile color. Five bids, three of us bidding, on SuperRare, under their curated banner. And this was not some listing that slipped in a side door. SuperRare announced the series, posted each phase, put the artist on their official monthly calendar, and tagged me in the bidder list of their own promo post. In November I went deeper and bought Healing Threads, a stitched physical about surgical scars. I liked the work. I still do.

In the first week of December her name came apart in public. It took about four days.

It started with a side by side. On the third of December the artist Faith Love posted her own 2024 drawing next to a Mireyita piece with the same composition under a gradient fill. Her follow up, is this literally my work traced, did six hundred thousand views. Mireyita's answer was that she had found the image on Pinterest, painted a physical, made one mistake, and had apologized privately already. Faith's answer to that was two days of denials in her DMs and a promised timelapse that never showed up. The manager dropped Mireyita that same afternoon and apologized to Faith. Within the week a researcher had filed a dossier of about sixteen works with Exchange Art, naming the designers whose work they matched, and on the tenth Exchange Art banned her account after what they called a formal review. The same day came a comparison aimed straight at SuperRare: one of her curated SuperRare one of ones lined up against another artist's original.

And SuperRare? The platform that curated her, calendared her, and tagged me by name? Nothing. No takedown, no statement, not a word to the collectors they had pointed at her. The listings just stayed up. The only ones who acted were a manager and a marketplace I had never bought from.

I want to be exact here, because it matters. Nobody in any of those threads ever matched Sacred Layers or Healing Threads to anything. My two pieces are not in the dossier. The artist told her collectors that Gradient Horizons comes purely from her own process, that only a small part of her 2024 work was affected. Maybe so. It is her word, and I file it as her word. What I own is a curated one of one, won at a fair auction, attached to a name that now carries a documented mess. Both things are true, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What I took from it is simple. Curated is a sales word, not a warranty. The label did its job on the way in: it raised the bidding, it raised my confidence, it put the platform's name next to the artist's. When the vetting failed, all that weight just evaporated. No recall, no refund, not even a letter. A physical gallery that sold you a disputed painting would owe you a conversation at minimum. In web3 the curated industry owed me nothing, and that is exactly what I got. Your protection as an art NFT collector is whatever you build yourself. Your own research, your own receipts, your own file.

So I built the file. Not a vibe, an actual file: the full timeline of what SuperRare posted and when, the comparison screenshots as they circulated, the platform statements, and every primary link. Open the collector file and read it the way I keep it, the flattering parts and the ugly parts together. Keeping the picture safe from a dead server was always half the job. The other half is keeping the record straight when nobody upstream will.

One more thing, collector to collector. At the end of the day, web3 and art and NFTs together are still the wild west. The same platform that takes its cut of every sale, primary and secondary, has a very short script for the day something goes wrong. Have a problem? Not ours. No refund. Goodbye. That is the entire customer service manual, and the fine print under it reads: that was your risk as a collector.

I keep collecting anyway. The art is worth it and the artists are worth it. But I collect like someone who has read that script, and you should too. Assume the label protects the platform, not you. Build your own file before you need it.