How do You Sell Electronic Art?

It's a Luddite's dream, a true indication of the challenges of the new technological age. You have spent months, perhaps years, developing an installation-based digital work of art. You have exhausted your energy and resources to ensure its perfection. Finally, after more months of spreading the word and getting interested parties, you land an exhibition space at a respected art gallery, one which derives a portion of its income from the selling of the exhibited art. Although you get paid a fee for the use of your work in the exhibit, you know the real income comes from the sale of these works. But the exhibit ends, and although it was hailed as a success and you are lauded for your innovation of, you don't get a single offer for purchase. Why? Because the piece is considered too technically-demanding, too high-maintenance, and consumes too much space. You go home with your work, wishing you had stuck with oil painting. The Luddite's cheer.

This scenario is becoming an increasingly common one. Art galleries which depend on the sale of exhibited work as a portion of their revenue are becoming more and more reluctant to specialize in electronic art. The ones which do -- particularly those in the United States, which depend heavily on non-governmental sources of revenue -- are increasingly challenged by the fact that most patrons don't want to deal with complicated, high-maintenance media because of the kind of technical attention it requires.

Galleries and patrons have a long history of each needing the other. Galleries deal in the upper ionosphere of high-class, high-income art which they sell to people who have enough money to support such causes. The people buying the art they sell consider such purchases a symbol of wealth and cultural integrity.

But throughout this history, the purchaser had the convenience of simply having to hand over some cash, take out an insurance policy, and hang the picture on the wall. That's it. Invite the Rockerfeller's over, honey, we've got a new Dalli. The average modern-day patron of the arts does not want to bother with down-time, boot-up procedures, CRT configurations, camcorder white-balance settings, or video wall synchronizations. And even if they did, few of their friends and colleagues would be able to appreciate the works. They are an acquired taste. In this time of new technologies, traditional media still have the best interface.

For electronic art, the essential problem is this: historically speaking, all traditional visual art has been space-based. That is, the piece has been created and displayed in a fixed space. Its existence is not based upon the presence of a participant, you simply hang the picture on a wall or put the sculpture in the middle of the floor, and there it stays. As soon as technology began to introduce the possibility of interactivity, works of art which used such technology became time-based. They required the presence of the onlooker in a given moment in time in order to begin a series of events which was part of the experience. These works usually require more elaborate setups, and hence, there are more technical glitches, more space to be taken up, and more effort required to mask the equipment which makes the final effect possible.

The other challenge associated with time-based art is that, unlike a painting or a sculpture, ownership is very difficult to guarantee. All reproductions of oil painting are inferior to the original, but software and digital images can be copied with no degradation in quality. An artist could sell a work to a patron in Montreal, only to recreate the same work from the master files on his/her own computer system and then sell it to another patron in Japan. Although most artists are honest about the agreements they or their agents make, such a concern to a potential buyer of electronic art is of paramount importance.

Needless to say, artists and gallery curators alike are scratching their heads in an effort to deal with the many changes that digital art is making to the traditional art space. Some artists, like Toronto's David Rokeby and his Very Nervous System, generate a portion of their income by selling the software they create to be used in installation works. Other galleries in Canada known for specializing in digital art rely on government grants as a source of funds, grants which (in case you haven't heard) are beginning to dry up in the wake of deficit-reduction politics.

Sleep tight, and don't let the Luddites bite.

Mark J. Jones - ed.