I recently received an email alerting me in the subject heading that my husband had sent me a gift. This wasn’t unusual, this is what people do, find silly things on the internet and sprinkle them into each other’s virtual mailboxes, the cheeky e-cards, the funny animal video, the link to a news article. I’m busy, so I assumed it was something of that ilk and reminded myself to open it later. Within an hour I received a text from him:
Did you like your gift?
I went back into my email and opened it to discover he had sent me a virtual artwork. And that I had to download an app in order to view it. This was starting to feel like a long walk to get a roast beef sandwich, but I followed the instructions in the notice and downloaded my gift, a Matt Collishaw titled Burning Flower. To buy a real Matt Collishaw digital print you have to spend about 5,000 USD.
I love art. I don’t get a chance to see as much of it as I would like, and purchasing art is a frivolous and expensive endeavor for parents who have a mortgage, four kids, and a lot of milk to buy. I love taking my kids to actual art museums and galleries but any parent knows what a pain that can be, the admission prices, keeping your children from running through the rooms, the raised brows of art connoisseurs who have no interest in humans of a certain age asking questions in loud voices or demanding where the museum bathroom is. I texted him back:
It’s cool. Did it cost anything?
People in relationships where bank accounts are shared get this conversation, the questions about how much things cost, lunches out, magazine subscriptions, the overpriced latte and scone purchased on the way to work. People in relationships where bank accounts are shared also know when a reply is not forthcoming that one of the members of this relationship spent a bit too much money on something really stupid. I investigated it myself.
64 dollars.
For virtual art.
For something I do not own except for on my screens, my cell phone, my computer, or my TV if I download the app to that screen.
64 dollars is a lot of milk. I know I come off as an ungrateful, shitty gift recipient and I should have just thanked him and enjoyed my virtual art, this burning flower by one of the Young British Artists, something if I saw in a video installation in an actual museum I would have adored. I texted him back.
You basically spent 64 dollars on a GIF.
Later when he came home he downloaded the app on our television, and we watched the art for a good 20 minutes. We made our children watch the art. They didn’t get it. They thought it was sort of cool but couldn’t begin to understand why their dumb parents could spend that much money on something that could only be played with on screens and wasn’t a video game. I told everyone this was a movie out, a pizza night. I put it on the TV frequently and call it Mom’s Art Show. I’m getting my money’s worth.
There are other artists you can purchase works from using this app, titled [S]Edition. You can buy a Tracy Emin neon. You can buy a Jenny Holzer truism. You can spend 800 dollars on a virtual Damien Hirst skull titled For Heaven’s Sake that does nothing but rotate. The idea behind [S]edition is that anyone can collect art, the virtual items are limited edition, and collectors can also trade them amongst themselves like grownup Pokemons. It’s absurd. I need excuses to show off my art more, I need a playground opportunity where some other mom whips out her cell phone to show me a picture of her kid and I can whip out mine in exchange and show off my burning flower.
I want my kids to love art like I do. I love books, movies, music and art. I want them to get excited about it and care about it and get that feeling when you see a creation you love, a painting or a sculpture or a photograph or an instillation, that sort of swoony feeling you have when you encounter something you find beautiful or interesting or cool. I can haul them to local museums and galleries but I can’t afford to take them to MOMA in NYC or the Saatchi gallery in London or to even roam around the rooms of La Luz de Jesus in Silver Lake, geeking out over the Camille Rose Garcia and the attached gift shop. My kids don’t care. Unless they created it and it hangs on my ‘fridge they have yet to care about art.
I don’t know how old I was when I first started being really interested in art. My parents didn’t collect art, save for the occasional yard sale flower painting or a framed Bowie poster. I remember seeing Dali books growing up, the occasional museum field trip, getting older and attending high school and taking classes and learning about famous painters and deciding for myself what was cool and what I found boring (15 year olds have little interest in Renaissance art.) Caring about art and learning about art and wanting to cultivate this in your offspring is about as pretentious an endeavor as enrolling your toddler in a slam poetry workshop. Signing them up for baseball rarely meets a raised brow, wanting them to know the difference between applied arts and fine arts is pretty much requesting a playground ass kicking or a scoffing from other parents who find shit like this bourgeois. But it is really any different than wanting your kids to cheer for your favorite football team or share your interest in comic books? Other parents want to dress their kids in Ramones shirts and take them to see Wes Anderson movies, these little hipsters who mimic their parents tastes in movies and music. I just want my kids to give a damn about beauty, about art. You can’t force these things, I get that, and I am all too happy to explore art on their level, the Play-doh and the watercolors, the excitement they have when we find something kid-friendly and that still falls under the art moniker, the 50 dollar artist qees you can nab from Kid Robot.
The idea of collecting virtual art works is stupid. As stupid as this is, and it is overall stupid, I can’t help but scroll through the artworks for sale, I contemplate skipping another pizza delivery and adding to my collection. There is one in particular, Matt Pyke’s Transfiguration which shows a lumbering figure walking across the screen, morphing from fire to rock to metal to a hulking technicolor fur-covered beast, the sound he makes as he moves meditative and soothing. I want him. My kids would probably get into him. He is 72 dollars and there are only two left. He could sell out at any time. Lots of other people have him. He was once an edition of 1,000. 72 dollars on something that isn’t real, that s just an image, that can’t be hung, or touched or passed down to my children after I am in the ground. I close my computer screen. My kids have no interest. I have milk to buy.
