Digitalarti Mag's blog

The digital art market has modeled itself on the traditional visual arts market, with the tensions that are specific to these artistic practices; these tensions are related to questions about the piece's uniqueness, its originality, authenticity, and its relationship to its time. Artists and galleries have experimented with different sales models; and, though there has been some change in recent years, no art market for this type of work has yet to have come about.

What role does the art market play in the conservation of digital art? In order for a piece to be conserved, it has to be associated with a value. Furthermore, where there is market value, there must be aesthetic value, which, in turn, creates market value. The value of a piece of art is determined by the interaction of several protagonists: the art dealer, the museum curator, the art historian, and the art critic. The value that is given to a piece leads to its conservation, and vice versa. The market is one of the places where art is exchanged, even in cases where access to that art is free (as is the case with net art).

While it’s early yet to speak of a real digital art market, there has been some movement in that direction over the past few years. A good example of this is the Holy Fire, Art of the Digital Age exhibit, which took place at the iMAL (Interactive Media Art Laboratory, dedicated to digital culture and technology) from the 18 to the 30 of April 2008, in Brussels, as part of the "Off" program of the contemporary arts fair, ArtBrussels. The exhibit's theme was the monstration of "collectable" digital art to be found on the art market, either in galleries or in private collections.

In organizing this exhibit, Yves Bernard and Domenico Quaranta sought to expose digital art beyond the "ghetto" of its usual circuits (festivals, specialized spaces and web sites), and come directly into contact with a contemporary arts event. This exhibit gave rise to a dispute among certain artists and cri-tics, opposed to the rematerialization of software or pieces designed to be shown on line. The exhibit was almost entirely made up of autonomous objects made to be hung up on walls, that react to a visitor’s presence, impressions, performance images, and non-interactive, non-participative video installations; and yet, most of the exhibit's 27 artists or collectives were specialized in interactive art, and usually net art.

In the exhibit catalogue, exhibit curator and critic Domenico Quaranta explains the importance of the market in the life cycle of art work, beyond simply financing the ongoing production of artists: When the market is functioning correctly, it plays a decisive role as buffer between the experimental freedom of the artist and the historicization of their work. On the one hand, you have complete freedom, and on the other, a series of physical, economic and cultural pre-requisites in order for a piece of work to last over time. The result of this collision is what we call the "work of art"(1). The exhibit brought together work from galleries specialized in digital art, such as Bitforms and Postmasters in New York, DAM in Berlin, or Numeris Causa (whose Parisian gallery closed in 2009).

Rarefaction
What do collectors buy? According to Steven Sacks, the former web entrepreneur and start-up creator who founded the Bitforms gallery in New York (with a branch in Seoul), buyers, including private collectors and companies, still prefer material objects to software(2). In 2005, he started the Software ART space project, which sold works of CD-ROM screen art on line for $125 (a limited series of 5000 CD-ROMs). The experiment didn’t last. Even pure software or online pieces are often sold
as objects, such as a computer containing the software (or access to a server), or a screen dedicated to the piece, like the frame of a painting. The price, obviously, isn’t the same as that of files on a server, but money doesn’t seem to be a factor. The legal definition of a work of art is based on the concept of scarcity. The artistic photograph and video art, both of which are precursors to digital art, both followed the model of the visual arts market, rather than that of the print market. The parallel is particularly illustrative for video art. Video art got started in the beginning of the 1960s, as the Portapak brought video cameras within the reach of the consumer. At the time, artists believed in giving shape to a utopia, based on the idea that images could be created spontaneously, for immediate distribution, and with a small budget, outside the framework of mass media.
The idea of limited distribution was foreign to this approach. The rarefaction of video art began later, simultaneous to its commercialization in the 1980s, which took two forms: putting a cap on the number of copies produced, and the emergence of the video installation, which combined video tape and scenography, coupled with the presence of other objects, or the participation of the audience. The number of copies was limited arbitrarily, rather than in function technological imperatives.
This strategy applied to both private and institutional collectors. The market for video installations, however, was the museum, because of constraints connected to the showing, storage and conservation of the works of art.

Reproduction
The initial phases of net art and software art, for example, were rather similar to those of video art. They share the immediate and spontaneous nature of the creative process, and the possibility of being created and distributed at lower cost. These are, however, digital works, as opposed to video production, which uses primarily analogue technology, with a resulting loss of reproductive quality. Generally speaking, for the video rush market, the richer the sound and image are (with higher
quality materials, such as Beta), the fewer copies produced, and the higher the price.
Conversely, prices drop when the copies are made on material that gives a lower quality rendering (like VHS video cassettes). Concerning digitally based pieces, there’s no difference in quality between the original and the copy, and the difference in value is purely conventional. As for internet pieces, scarcity applies neither to the production side, nor to the distribution side of the equation. Maintaining certain pieces in a situation where their eventual obsolescence is expected, even programmed, is a way of adding a dose of scarcity; the technical fragility of digital arts brings them closer to the unique object which is central to the market. De facto, those pieces that "survive", will have a certain value.

Beyond the gallery, the strategies used by the artist to sell their work is considerably different from those used by the dealer; these strategies bring them closer to the culture and printing industries than to the unique piece of art sold in galleries. With certain types of digital art, for example, the artist can charge for downloading a piece, while putting on line a free version of the same piece (as with the Entropy8Zuper’s Godlove Museum project), or else he can charge a subscription fee in exchange for access to a reserved portion of the internet site, as with Mark Napier's Waiting Room. Some artists have chosen to produce "tie-in products", like Nicolas Frespech and his books on demand. Other artists have created their own sales galleries to market their pieces, for example the Electroboutique launched by artists Alexei Shulgin and Aristarkh Chernyshev. They designed a series of colorful, pop, consummately consumable, provocative pieces, "Media Art 2.0". Casting an ironic eye on the market, they take part in it completely.

(1)

Yves Bernard & Domenico Quaranta (under the commission of), Holy Fire, art of the Digital Age (iMAL, Brussels / Belgium, 2008).

(2)

www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=480

ANNE LAFORET

+ INFO:

< www.bitforms.com > < www.electroboutique.com > < www.imal.org/HolyFire/fr/ > < www.numeriscausa.com > < www.postmastersart.com > < http://softwareartspace.com/ >

Published in the Digitalarti Mag #2.

Digitalarti Mag, the international digital art and innovation magazine.

Read the magazine for free online. 

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