Pure Digital Art

Purely digital art sold as software or access to online environments is a developing trend in the art market, Slate reports. At the Frieze Art Fair in London in October Eli Sudbrack, a Rio-born, New York-based artist also known as "Assume Vivid Astro Focus," displayed his work in a huge tent in Regent’s park. Close by, two galleries (Peres Projects of Los Angeles & John Connelly Presents of New York) were offering to sell the digitally printed wallpaper from the installation for $15,000 three times using an electronic-edition sales model that "has left other art dealers perplexed and envious":

In this model, buyers receive only a certificate of authenticity and a CD-ROM holding the giant Adobe Illustrator file used to produce the wallpaper’s image. Despite the high price tag, getting the wallpaper physically fabricated remains the collector’s problem—and an expensive one at that, easily running into thousands (or even tens of thousands) of dollars.

Purely digital art has been creeping into the art market over the last decade, but it still remains very much marginalized. What sets Sudbrack apart is that his model is a hybrid, safely within the object-oriented paradigm of classical collecting yet exploiting digital production’s advantages. (In the broadband age, the CD with the piece’s image is really just a prop, after all.)

The bigger issue is the "secondary market" where work could slip into peer to peer networks and be distributed openly destroying the resale value. Could? PSFK wonders…

Slate Article