International private museum owners plan to co-commission digital works of art, which they will then share. The Italian collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, who is taking part in an Art Basel conversation about commissioning art on 18 June, is at the forefront of this drive.
She plans to jointly commission media works with the founders of other private museums and collectors, who established a formal association at the Art15 fair in London last month. Members include Budi Tek, who opened the Yuz museum in Shanghai last year; Wang Wei, who, together with her husband Liu Yiqian, inaugurated the second Long Museum in Shanghai in March; and Ramin Salsali, who owns a private museum in Dubai.
Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, whose Turin foundation is currently showing works by the US digital artist Ian Cheng (Emissary in the Squat of Gods, until 11 October), says video art is a perfect medium for institutions to jointly commission because “it exists in editions, the transportation is cheap and it gives artists the opportunity to make works”.
While co-commissioning works is a new development, the practice of co-owning art is more established. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, for example, has been jointly buying digital art with other public and private bodies since 2010. The museum—whose advisory committee includes Sandretto Re Rebaudengo—now co-owns four videos, including Static (2009) by Steve McQueen, which it bought with the Katherine and Keith L. Sachs Art Foundation, and Yael Bartana’s And Europe Will Be Stunned (2007-11), which is jointly owned with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; another edition of the latter is co-owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
The obvious incentive for sharing works is financial, says Carlos Basualdo, the Philadelphia museum’s curator of contemporary art. He also notes that it allows institutions to pool resources, particularly when it comes to conservation.
Prices can vary wildly for new media art because it comes in such diverse forms as video, animation, 3D-printed sculptures or websites. Some artists such as Bill Viola and Cory Arcangel can command six-figure sums. But if your budget doesn’t stretch that far, you can buy art by Ed Fornieles, Chloe Wise and Leo Gabin, among others, for around $400 (rising to around $5,600) on Daata Editions. The online marketplace, which launched in New York last month, is releasing its third round of digital works this week during Art Basel.
The new venture is—fittingly—a collaboration between the curator and founder of Artprojx David Gryn (who previously organised the Art Basel film section) and the London-based collector Anita Zabludowicz. As we went to press, Daata Editions had sold 30 editions of various works, while the artist Jon Rafman’s video, Oh the Humanity (2015), had been downloaded for free 400 times.
“We need to believe that, in the same way we easily buy music and films online via the likes of iTunes or Amazon, we can buy art via digital files and not have to [physically] possess an object to give a work its validation,” Gryn says. He is not alone in this belief; the marketplace is crowded with websites where buyers can pay to download digital art, including Sedition, NeonMob, Curioos and NewHive.
Some artists are, however, bucking the trend and selling the screens that display their work. “I’ve never sold a piece of art as a video file on a memory stick,” says the British artist Dominic Harris, who customises his own screens. “Everything tends to run on integrated digital canvases.”
The US artist Josh Kline prefers to give away his videos, charging collectors for the sculptural frame instead. His latest installation, Freedom (2015), was included in the recent New Museum Triennial, Surround Audience. In the piece, videos are embedded in the bellies of mannequins that resemble police officers, albeit with Teletubby faces. “Josh believes the moving image should be free and accessible to everyone,” says the New York art adviser Lisa Schiff.
Kline’s selling model chimes with Schiff’s recent exhibition at Max Hetzler gallery in Berlin (stand B10), Open Source: Art at the Eclipse of Capitalism. She says that the show was inspired by the writings of the economic theorist Jeremy Rifkin, who believes that traditional business models will be replaced by collaborative, networked systems by the end of the century.
Schiff is mindful not to separate new media artists from the wider art world. In the exhibition, she displayed the work of digital artists such as Kline, Tabor Robak and John Gerrard alongside painters such as Andy Warhol and Frank Stella. “Digital art is just contemporary art,” she says. “It’s like talking about the internet. We don’t think of the internet as a thing; it’s a condition of being. So is digital; it’s everywhere, it’s everything.”
• Commissioning in Today’s Market, Auditorium, Hall 1, Thursday 18 June, 5pm