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PAINPANG.COM: TELEVISION ART

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"ART FOR WHEN THERE'S NOTHING ON TV"

BY ANDREA PETERSEN

(WALL STREET JOURNAL, 2-16-2005)

"Galleries Sell Digital Images

To Fill Idle Flat Screens;

Oops, 'I left the Art On' "

black velvet 3.1

Artist Statement About His "Throw-Away Art" :

"tell me how much the market says it's worth

and i'll tell you why it's important—

i'll tell you why it's valuable

if you tell me how much

it's worth to you"

—unsigned.

(WSJ 2-16-05 continued below)

THOSE SLEEK FLAT SCREENS popping up on people's walls may just look like fancy televisions. A new generation of artists and gallery owners wants you to think of them as something else: an empty picture frame.

Purveyors of a relatively new genre, so-called digital art, aim to fill that blank screen. The field includes software art, where the "art" is the computer code itself, which directs the images and sounds seen on the screen, Internet-based collaborative works, where a group of far-flung collectors can view and play with a piece simultaneously, and DVD art, which looks like more conventional video art.

Much of the work is abstract; a piece called "Cells" by up-and-coming software artist Casey Reas looks like tiny organisms floating on the screen. On "Waiting Room," an interactive and collaborative work by artist Mark Napier, a toolbar displays various shapes, each accompanied by a corresponding sound. With a wireless mouse, owners can click on a shape, drag it into the image and help create a constantly morphing work. They see instantly the collective result of everyone's input. "Waiting Room" is being sold in 50 "shares," currently priced at $1,000 apiece.

Digital works, the latest genre of new media art, are usually sold in limited edition DVDs. But this spring, Steven Sacks, the director of New York City's bitforms gallery, which specializes in cutting-edge digital art, plans to start selling lower-price original works of software art at software ART space (www.softwareartsspace.com). Prices will range from $100 for unlimited-edition works to $1,000 for numbered pieces. Buyers will get a sleekly packaged disc; limited editions will be signed by the artist.

While there are always risks to buying art, these works come with some unique problems. The collector with a Picasso on the wall doesn't need an IT department; digital art collectors sometimes do. When Peter S. Hirshberg, a technology entrepreneur, bought several pieces of software art for his New York loft, it took some doing to get them all running on the same screen.

"I had to have this real Unix geek come out and make it all work," Mr. Hirshberg says. "At one point I had the artist, the geek and the galleryist all here." Other potential issues range from piracy—it's much cheaper and simpler to copy software code or a DVD than a painting—to DVD scratches. And since computer operating systems and hardware change every couple of years, there's no guarantee that you'll be able to display your art a decade from now, or pass it down to your children.

This corner of the art market is still embryonic, with demand being driven in part by the falling prices and surging popularity of new TVs and flat-screen computer monitors. Prices for the works themselves are fairly low, in the hundreds of dollars to the low thousands.

But a few works have commanded more. Recently, Colorado-based artist Mark Amerika sold an edition of his piece, Filmtext, to a private collector for $10,000, a piece believed to be the highest so far for an Internet-based work. The piece has a science-fiction feel; users poke around in a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape.

"Prices are not going to be very high for unique pieces because you can easily duplicate it," says Beau Takahara, founding director of ZeroOne, a Mountain View, Calif., nonprofit art and technology organization. "It is a problem video artists have had since they started creating work in the early '70s."

But art-world experts expect prices to rise as the art form becomes more established, just as it did for photography and video.

The original works differ from a more popularized version of digital art that involves reproducing famous pieces for flat screens. Often, these amount to essentially screensavers. Beon Media Inc., a closely-held Seattle company, recently launched GalleryPlayer, a service that sells, for example, Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams photographs. You can buy one image at 99 cents, or a monthly subscription starting at $4.95.

A competing service, from Roku LLC, based in Palo Alto, Calif., sells packages of images of master works by artists such as Degas or Picasso for $39.99 or $69.99. It's like getting posters of your favorite works from a museum gift shop, but you can choose from a huge inventory and change your display as often as you want.

By contrast, artists who design their own works are using digital technology to make a living and build legitimacy in the mainstream art world.

And they are having some success. Last year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City bought a piece by Jim Campbell, an artist who does large-scale electronic installations.

But museum goers may not have quite the intimate relationship with the work that owners do.

Mr. Hirshberg, the technology entrepreneur, owns a piece of Mr. Napier's "Waiting Room." He says he has been woken up in the middle of the night by the sounds of someone—somewhere—playing with the work. "I'm asleep and there's this racket downstairs," Mr. Hirshberg says. "Then there's the slow realization that I left the art on."

Some Wall Street Journal illustrations, captions and chart for above article:

Downloading Art

"A new breed of artist is creating digital work, much of which you can display on your flat-screen television or monitor. Many works can be viewed online. Here are a few of the innovators:

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