"Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
Oscar Wilde
Mum's Mum
The question of value - the price that digital art commands in the art marketplace - is a complicated one. Few would argue the point that a traditional painting is a one of a kind possession while digital art is purposely made for duplication. Yet most traditional artists today have their work professionally photographed in order to produce at least limited edition prints of their "masterpiece." Museums sell prints, posters and art cards of famous works. Yet none of this activity reduces the value of the original work. I contend that the digital artist's original work was often as time consuming and difficult to produce as the painter's. [As I said in my short rant the other day, in some cases I suspect that it is MORE time consuming and difficult. How many "Oneness" paintings do you think Newman could have created in a day if they are similar to that one? Several I'm sure - yet it takes me two weeks full time to do most of my digital paintings.] And it is certainly possible that a digital artist could, if he/she wished to, limit the number of prints, or restrict the reproductions to giclee on canvas in order to increase the value of those reproductions. A Certificate of Authenticity might also reassure buyers that there is intrinsic value in a print or canvas of a digital work. But even employing those methods, could a digital artist expect to command the kind of price for even a large limited edition print than prints of an original oil or acrylic would get?
I don't think so. In an article back in 2008, the TUTS website posted on its Design and Illustration division "54 Mind-Blowing Digital Paintings." Virtually ALL of them were Manga comics, fantasy figures, game figures, or illustrations - all brilliant yes - but none that looked like traditional paintings and all designed for digital viewing, gaming or animation. None commanded a $44 million price tag either. That has changed very little in the past six years - traditional digital painting seldom makes it into these lists and fractal art virtually never. Fantasy art and 3D continue to command the most attention and the highest prices for digital art because these forms are essential to video gaming, animation and interactive web designs.
There IS some hope, however, whether you are a traditional digital painter or a digital abstract artist. The "hope" comes in the form of an article in Vulture by Jerry Saltz that is something of a "swan song" for the traditional gallery show. Decrying the fact that art shows go up but "without much consequence except for sales or no sales," Saltz says that internet sites now offer "high end sales" and online art auctions and that such sites are proliferating at an amazing pace. This means "art is about nothing but commerce" which is not what the gallery venue was; it was a place to engage with other artists, critics and students of art, a place for conversation and thought. He complains, "When so much art is sold online and at art fairs, it's great for the lucky artists who make money but it leaves out everyone who isn't already a brand." Art dealer, Kenny Schachter goes a step further, noting that "the higher and higher prices are for fewer and fewer artists."
Dealing an additional blow to the gallery show, auction houses like Christie's are now providing a venue for emerging artists "unrepresented by galleries," and in this way making that art available only to collectors, not the general public. This again, is a great thing for the few lucky artists selected by such auction houses (physical auctions or online auction houses like ArtSpace) but such art remains the possession of the wealthy, and the very process, says Saltz, "makes being around art less special. Too many buyers keep their purchases in storage, in crates, awaiting resale. Mediocre Chinese photorealism has become a tradeable packaged good."
So the narrow thread of "hope" offered by the death of the physical gallery show still offers little enough in the way of value and acceptance to the digital artist. I see "high end art" on a site I belong to and I've no idea how it was selected to be on that "high end" page. Most of the items offer a high priced original oil or acrylic, however, so I personally do not consider that traditional digital painting. These pieces were created as traditional art works initially and THEN digitized for much lower priced prints. Digital art, BY DEFINITION, is art created originally with digital tools and digital techniques. My own painting above is certainly no Georgia O'Keefe, nor does it pretend to be but it was hand-painted digitally stroke by stroke (in this case pointillist dot by pointillist dot) just as O'Keefe did her flowers.
I am represented by a small gallery in upstate New York but sales in this gallery tend to be original photography or original oil/acrylic works, sculpture and jewelry and that is primarily who is represented by this gallery - photographers and traditional artists. There are exceptions, of course, but they are rare. I have friends whose photographic art (photographs altered by applying textures or recomposing several photographic images) is licensed by high volume publishers and while I consider their work to be art in the truest sense of the word, and I'm incredibly happy for each of them that their artwork is popular enough to make a living from it, that is not the case for most of us who are digital artists and digital painters. Saltz ponders the question of the future of medium sized and small galleries by asking, "I wonder if a much bigger shakeout is about to happen, one that makes art resemble any mainstream business." And if it's just business, is it art?
The question of value then is multifaceted. Does a piece have value because it's in a traditional medium, because the critics like it, because a gallery is willing to show it, an auction house willing to auction it...or is its value based solely on market forces. Can a digital work even begin to compete and if so, how will the value of such easily reproducible art be maintained or even increased? If I were to license and sell 20,000 copies of the digital painting above would that make it more or less valuable as a work of art? If I master the business tools of social media, online art sites, self-promotion, looking at trends, checking out decor magazines for hot colors, do I do that at the cost of the actual artistic merits of my work? Or am I just smart enough to realize that digital art and digital painting are not meant to be measured by the same standards as an original oil and that its very accessibility and availability to the average person who loves what they see and can actually afford to own it makes it more valuable? I think the day is coming when a person will look at a digital painting and say, "I love that painting...Oh good, it's digital - and that means I can own it!" Value is really not so much in the medium as in the eye of the beholder as well as in the heart of the artist who created it.
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