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.
Tags: art, artwork, eve vawter, money, relationships
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How are they actually enforcing the limited edition-ness of virtual art, any idea? Seems like if it’s digital, people will be able to figure out how to multiply and distribute it.
It reminds me in a way of digital books. I adore my Kindle, but for its convenience. Easy to transport; quick access to more books; adjustable font size. But I still love and read hard copy books all the time too.
What drives me nuts, though, is when I actually purchase a Kindle book (as opposed to borrowing it from the library or through Prime), and lending is not “enabled” – meaning I can’t loan it out to a friend who also has a Kindle. Even if lending is enabled, you can only loan it once (I believe). I get it – digital rights management, copyrights, and so on. But not even letting me lend it that one time?! It denies me one of my favorite pastimes, which is forcing books on my friends.
On another note, a lot of people are often all “but it’s just a file! Why can’t I have it?” about library e-books, but they pay for those licenses, and they are not an unlimited supply.
DRM almost always creates more inconvenience for the legit consumer than it does for any determined pirate.
I wind up routinely needing to download a cracked copy of software I just legitimately bought in order to get it to run. What the hell, Microsoft
see also my complaints about Steam.
They use a form of “digital watermarking”, and each piece is numbered, and comes with a digital certificate of authenticity. Still, not sure how someone would not be able to figure out a way around it if they were dyyying to forge a digital Hirst..
Like a movie or a program or anything else digital, you could pirate a copy, and it might work about the same so long as you don’t want the support plan, but the whole value structure of the fine art world is already centered around authenticity and exclusivity.
There’s no material reason for anyone except a tiny subset of art historians to care about whether a painting is the actual Mona Lisa or a forgery, yet it’s by far the most important thing about it. There’s nothing about a Pollock that’s worth $164,700,000 where a competent imitiation might be valued at maybe $200 and a similar artist without the name might someday hope to get $1000, except that the one’s a Pollock and there’s only ever gonna be one and everyone knows it cost a lot of money and you can’t have it, only me, it’s mine
That said I would never consider buying one of these unless they added some kind of system wherein you can make your virtual art hoard fight and absorb someone else’s
I feel like, in a giant MMO art fight, the Surrealist art would eat everything. Those poor rustic Rococo lovers and little colorful Minimalist polygons and blotchy broody Impressionist people and stuff wouldn’t stand a chance against Dali’s spindly nightmare elephants.
I see your spindly elephant and raise you a GIANT SHARK THAT FEEDS ON ALBINOS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_and_the_Shark…
I don’t think collecting virtual art is stupid, but much of the art is made with the idea of planned obsolescence in mind, and its degradation or eventual disappearance is intentional on the part of the artist. In that regard, I think the pursuit of collecting it is an interesting one and poses a lot of why and how questions for collecting and maintaining it. But, I also say this as someone who wrote her dissertation on the collection of digital art and worked in the digital art department of a museum, so I fell pretty far down a digital art rabbit hole. To me, some of it is worth collecting and documenting in various ways, and some of it is not, similar to other, more tangible forms of art.
I can’t remember exactly how [S]edition art is protected from duplication, but I knew someone who had bought a few artworks from it, and liked to show them off on his ipad (he was a curator in the dept.) and thought they were neat ways to have little pieces of work from major artists, much in the same way one would by a signed litho. by Picasso.
I enjoyed reading this! I’ve never been an “art person” and I don’t even have any interest in collecting paintings. And I had never heard of collecting “virtual art.” Honestly it still seems a little silly, but I think now I sort of get why someone would want to have some. Although as mentioned in the comment above, I’m very curious to see how changes in technology are going to affect the practice.
“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.”
File under “People I’m glad I don’t shop for”
My parents used to take us to art museums everywhere we went, even though we couldn’t really understand what was going on. (My mom’s favorite anecdote is me crying at around 2 years old because the Andy Warhol soup cans were not at the modern art museum in DC where they should be.) Sometimes I was bored, but in general we learned to appreciate it. I guess the best you can do is expose your kid(s) to art when possible?
I love you for “Pokemons.”
One of the great gifts of Los Angeles is access to the museums. LACMA is free to residents after 3PM, with ID. The Getty is free after parking, which I think is up to $13 now, dunno, taking the bus works great. All the museums have a free day. The Artwalk is free.
My first time in LA, I was a teenager and happened upon the Barnsdall Art Park, an artist had created “Houses” of canvas painted to resemble stained glass windows. They were viewed by going inside, where the bright lights shining from the other side made the colors molten. I’d no idea art could look like that; it blew my mind and changed my life.
So, yeah, run your kids around at home first, but pack em up and show them Art.
Yeah a big “meh” to this idea.
Tangentially related but I am an art lover and moving on to supporting small artists. I have just been very annoyed lately at the frequency with which a piece of art or photograph goes viral – something really beautiful, unique, and just cool that catches us, and then this artwork isn’t available for purchase. And everyone suddenly gets excited about art on the internet and then you find. . .that the artist doesn’t sell prints. Or they’re only represented by some obscure gallery across the country and to “call for pricing.”
Now, I am not rich but I do have disposable income, and I have dropped a couple hundred on pieces of art I’ve liked before. I realize I am not the big rich collector, but I spend money on art, is what I’m saying, and with some frequency. Artists complain about how hard it is to make a living off of art, but then make it so ridiculously hard to actually 1.) contact you and 2.) give you reasonable amounts of money for your artwork. If you are an artist and you don’t have an online presence and don’t sell prints or small works under $100, I don’t even know what you are doing.
And even big artists. . .especially big artists! Why can’t Jenny Holzer put off a large series of prints and sell them for $100? Hell, contract out for that. Who cares. I understand the art world is about selectivity but you are already doing ok and people like you.
Ok, rant over. Thanks for listening!
I don’t understand the – well, it’s not scoffing, exactly — the resistance to indulging in a purchased piece of animated art. The biggest objection seems to be that one can only enjoy it when there’s a device nearby in which to display it.
In function and access, that means it’s not substantially different from buying a piece of digital music. Sure, the price is higher, but not outrageously so (and of course we’re not entitled to scrutinize other people’s uses for their disposable income).
I admit that I don’t get the visceral appeal myself, but I think that’s a gap in my understanding and a by-product of living with fewer hand-held devices than most people in my socioeconomic group, not a failure of the medium itself.
[edited to add: I’m genuinely curious about this from an art historical standpoint, both the desire to own such pieces and the resistance from people who don’t share that desire. I think this is a fascinating intersection of new art and old cultural desires.]
To me, the thought of looking at a piece of digital art versus an actual physical piece that I can see in front of me just feels different. If I owned visual art, I would want to display it, to change my space with it. Being able to look at it on a device wouldn’t feel the same to me. I don’t disagree or disapprove of people choosing to buy and look at digital art, but it wouldn’t have the same meaning to me, because the feeling that I get is so different.
That’s my instinctive response, too: that I’d much rather own the physical medium than the virtual one.
And that’s part of why I’m comparing it to music rather than visual art: like digital music, a piece of digital art has necessary limitations on its display and enjoyment. Like digital music, it is licensed to you rather than tangibly belonging to you.
I have a deep resistance to buying digital music, and I share some of the reasons expressed here. But when it comes to music, I’m clearly in the minority — and further, I share the not-entirely-conscious concerns of an older audience, some of whom instinctively mistrust media we can’t handle with our hands and shelve in our stacks.
I’m a little surprised to find that this essay both makes me interested in digital art from a an art historian’s and hypothetical curator’s perspective and warms me up a little to digital-only music.
Imagine how digital art conservators must feel! (I stay far away from them at conferences: it makes my head hurt)
I don't understand the – well, it's not scoffing, exactly — the resistance to indulging in a purchased piece of animated art. The biggest objection seems to be that one can only enjoy it when there's a device nearby in which to display it.
In function and access, that means it's not substantially different from buying a piece of digital music. Sure, the price is higher, but not outrageously so (and of course we're not entitled to scrutinize other people's uses for their disposable income).
I admit that I don't get the visceral appeal myself, but I think that's a gap in my understanding and a by-product of living with fewer hand-held devices than most people in my socioeconomic group, not a failure of the medium itself.
[edited to add: I'm genuinely curious about this from an art historical standpoint, both the desire to own such pieces and the resistance from people who don't share that desire. I think this is a fascinating intersection of new art and old cultural desires.]
[edited: oops, my replay to robot_dinosaur went awry! It’s in its proper place now.]
[edited: oops, my replay to robot_dinosaur went awry! It's in its proper place now.]
That's my instinctive response, too: that I'd much rather own the physical medium than the virtual one.
And that's part of why I'm comparing it to music rather than visual art: like digital music, a piece of digital art has necessary limitations on its display and enjoyment. Like digital music, it is licensed to you rather than tangibly belonging to you.
I have a deep resistance to buying digital music, and I share some of the reasons expressed here. But when it comes to music, I'm clearly in the minority — and further, I share the not-entirely-conscious concerns of an older audience, some of whom instinctively mistrust media we can't handle with our hands and shelve in our stacks.
I'm a little surprised to find that this essay both makes me interested in digital art from a an art historian's and hypothetical curator's perspective and warms me up a little to digital-only music.