Fine Contemporary Art
Littleton, Colorado
Collecting New Media
Collecting New Media
By J. Gluckstern
For centuries, the art market has centered on the buying and selling of discrete objects, from paintings and sculptures to functional vessels and, relatively recently, photographs. Barring fraud, forgeries and physical damage, buying art was a clean transaction. The artist still got credit for making the object, but the collector owned it. Nuance entered the picture as the market itself gained sophistication, breadth and cultural cachet.
Buying and selling art in the 21st Century presents new challenges for collectors and artists alike, from keeping up with the expressive possibilities of what’s been broadly defined as “new media” to developing ways to preserve (or even locate) digital and Web-based works. For instance, in the case of Mark Napier’s “net.flag” www.potatoland.org, where Web site visitors can actually alter an electronic version of “a flag for the internet,” it’s hard to determine whether the “art” of the piece is in its constant viewer-directed morphing or in the community of viewers who do the morphing or in the idea of laying claim to the virtual online landscape in the first place.
Such dilemmas are only superficial for Mark Addison, a Boulder art advocate and curator (“About Us,” curated by Addison, hangs at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art through Sept. 6 www.bmoca.org. “I guess I come from a school that says there are not a lot of original things under the sun,” Addison says. “New media, for me, is just a different paintbrush.”
Addison does, however, note a shift in attitude among new media artists. “One of the good things about Web art is that the artist, instead of saying ‘that's my painting; it belongs to me,’ Web artists say, ‘I made this; have fun with it. If you change it, good. That'll mean you're interested.’”
The bigger issues for Addison have to do with preserving the specific technologies that made any given digital work possible. Compared to a painting, which could last hundreds of years if properly cared for, a digital work that was developed to run on Mac OS7, for instance, is already problematic to present and archive. And that’s only about a decade since it was created. In the case of Internet-based art, a realm where browsers and plugins and operating systems are updated every few months, these problems can grow very quickly.
Mark Amerika, whose career thus far has largely hinged on his production and theorizing about a variety of new forms — Amerika was one of the first artists to successfully exploit browser-based hyperlinks in the early to mid-‘90s — sees more objects associated with digital pieces, though much of it seems to be created in order to commodify more ephemeral works. By way of example, he mentions “Holy Fire,” a recent show in Brussels, Belgium, which included digital prints of avatars created in “Second Life,” standalone software art pieces running on small LCD screens and “unique sculptural objects” that incorporate working monitors. He also notes that many of the pieces were on loan from private collectors. But even Amerika acknowledges that “the love affair major institutions have had with Internet-based art is basically over.”
“These days,” Amerika says, “we can say that the generic art form known as ‘digital’ is really becoming just part of a larger trend in the making of hybrid art and that a lot of hybrid art is made using digital processes with various outcomes. In this way, digital art and its ‘others’ are everywhere and already a major part of the commercial art (world). It's an expansion of the major trend 10 years ago to integrate video into the collector scene.”
Addison also draws some similarities between the early days of collecting video and other kinds of objects that need to be plugged in — such as Bruce Nauman’s neon sculptures or Bill Viola’s digital video installations — to current problems associated with collecting and maintaining new media. Viola, in particular, has very exacting standards when it comes to how his work is presented, and it’s hard not to see a correlation between those standards and Viola’s recent seven-figure sales. At this point, though, new media doesn’t command such old media prices.
For Amerika, though, it’s not usually about the sale. “My situation is unique. As a kind of remix artist, all of my digital source material can be reconfigured into different formats and art pieces at any given time.
“I also find that by distributing my artwork and writing for free via the Internet in the ‘gift economy’ that I am able to raise the visibility and value of both my unique/limited edition works — including Internet art, installations, DVDs and prints — as well as my philosophy of art, which translates into a lot of opportunities to present my work publicly all over the world.”
Such soft influence (and success) suggests the limits of a purely object-based market. And for the most part, Addison agrees. “Is it ephemera? Should you collect it? Should artists be messing with it? I certainly say, yeah, we should.”
Regardless of whether one considers new media as a new paintbrush or a new idea, it seems clear that digital art is here to stay. And in spite of the problems involved, the market will have no choice but to follow.
By J. Gluckstern
For centuries, the art market has centered on the buying and selling of discrete objects, from paintings and sculptures to functional vessels and, relatively recently, photographs. Barring fraud, forgeries and physical damage, buying art was a clean transaction. The artist still got credit for making the object, but the collector owned it. Nuance entered the picture as the market itself gained sophistication, breadth and cultural cachet.
Buying and selling art in the 21st Century presents new challenges for collectors and artists alike, from keeping up with the expressive possibilities of what’s been broadly defined as “new media” to developing ways to preserve (or even locate) digital and Web-based works. For instance, in the case of Mark Napier’s “net.flag” www.potatoland.org, where Web site visitors can actually alter an electronic version of “a flag for the internet,” it’s hard to determine whether the “art” of the piece is in its constant viewer-directed morphing or in the community of viewers who do the morphing or in the idea of laying claim to the virtual online landscape in the first place.
Such dilemmas are only superficial for Mark Addison, a Boulder art advocate and curator (“About Us,” curated by Addison, hangs at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art through Sept. 6 www.bmoca.org. “I guess I come from a school that says there are not a lot of original things under the sun,” Addison says. “New media, for me, is just a different paintbrush.”
Addison does, however, note a shift in attitude among new media artists. “One of the good things about Web art is that the artist, instead of saying ‘that's my painting; it belongs to me,’ Web artists say, ‘I made this; have fun with it. If you change it, good. That'll mean you're interested.’”
The bigger issues for Addison have to do with preserving the specific technologies that made any given digital work possible. Compared to a painting, which could last hundreds of years if properly cared for, a digital work that was developed to run on Mac OS7, for instance, is already problematic to present and archive. And that’s only about a decade since it was created. In the case of Internet-based art, a realm where browsers and plugins and operating systems are updated every few months, these problems can grow very quickly.
Mark Amerika, whose career thus far has largely hinged on his production and theorizing about a variety of new forms — Amerika was one of the first artists to successfully exploit browser-based hyperlinks in the early to mid-‘90s — sees more objects associated with digital pieces, though much of it seems to be created in order to commodify more ephemeral works. By way of example, he mentions “Holy Fire,” a recent show in Brussels, Belgium, which included digital prints of avatars created in “Second Life,” standalone software art pieces running on small LCD screens and “unique sculptural objects” that incorporate working monitors. He also notes that many of the pieces were on loan from private collectors. But even Amerika acknowledges that “the love affair major institutions have had with Internet-based art is basically over.”
“These days,” Amerika says, “we can say that the generic art form known as ‘digital’ is really becoming just part of a larger trend in the making of hybrid art and that a lot of hybrid art is made using digital processes with various outcomes. In this way, digital art and its ‘others’ are everywhere and already a major part of the commercial art (world). It's an expansion of the major trend 10 years ago to integrate video into the collector scene.”
Addison also draws some similarities between the early days of collecting video and other kinds of objects that need to be plugged in — such as Bruce Nauman’s neon sculptures or Bill Viola’s digital video installations — to current problems associated with collecting and maintaining new media. Viola, in particular, has very exacting standards when it comes to how his work is presented, and it’s hard not to see a correlation between those standards and Viola’s recent seven-figure sales. At this point, though, new media doesn’t command such old media prices.
For Amerika, though, it’s not usually about the sale. “My situation is unique. As a kind of remix artist, all of my digital source material can be reconfigured into different formats and art pieces at any given time.
“I also find that by distributing my artwork and writing for free via the Internet in the ‘gift economy’ that I am able to raise the visibility and value of both my unique/limited edition works — including Internet art, installations, DVDs and prints — as well as my philosophy of art, which translates into a lot of opportunities to present my work publicly all over the world.”
Such soft influence (and success) suggests the limits of a purely object-based market. And for the most part, Addison agrees. “Is it ephemera? Should you collect it? Should artists be messing with it? I certainly say, yeah, we should.”
Regardless of whether one considers new media as a new paintbrush or a new idea, it seems clear that digital art is here to stay. And in spite of the problems involved, the market will have no choice but to follow.
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