While the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New York's Whitney Museum have already added Web-based artwork to their permanent holdings, private collectors have seemed less than eager to respond by buying works in new media.
How practical is it to buy new media artworks - electronic, video, and digital - which are more easily reproducible and, because they are usually based on particular technologies, more ephemeral than painting or sculpture? When Web browsers change unrecognizably, will anyone appreciate Web art built for old versions of Mosaic? Is it too soon to declare works of new media art as "masterpieces" worthy of serious collection?
Such questions, among others will be the subject of a rare, public roundtable discussion on Wednesday, 25 March at the San Francisco Art Institute. The conference, "Concept to Practice: A Panel Discussion on Collecting New Media Art" was organized by Gen Art, a national non-profit dedicated to exposing emerging visual artists, fashion designers, and filmmakers to new opportunities.
Featured at Wednesday's panel will be Natalie Jeremijenko, digital artist; S. Joy Mountford of Interval Research Corporation; Monica Vasilescu, Media Art Curator at Art-Tech, the Silicon Valley Institute of Art and Technology. Artist Jon Winet is the moderator.
Specific issues to be addressed at the panel include pinpointing whether sales are more effective in galleries or on the Web; exploring the integral role of the commercial and corporate sector in terms of nurturing new media art; examining fair prices for both artist and buyer; discussing the most appropriate means for educating buyers about new media art; and archival and conservation dilemmas.
Heather Peeler, a volunteer staff member at Gen Art who organized the roundtable, states that she planned on including a collector as well, but finding one proved to be a challenge. After spending six months contacting galleries, corporations, museums, and curators of Microsoft's corporate art collection, Peeler created a list of at least four individual private collectors. Of the collectors, who wished to stay unnamed, two were unavailable to participate in the 25 March event, and the other two declared themselves too new to the area of new media art to comment in a public arena.
"It's such a new genre that people are still trying to sort out their roles," states Peeler. "They're not seeing themselves as leaders, although they are. This could be because they buy new media not because it is new media, but because they responded to a piece or liked an artist."
The event, which has been in the planning stages since early 1997, is designed to bring artists, collectors, and scholars together to pose practical solutions when confronting a new paradigm in the arena of art buying.
"This panel suggests that a collision/encounter of cultures is underway, between new-media-trained, hypertext-savvy, digitally wired artists and an art world ready to get up to speed," states Winet, who is also quick to acknowledge the ironies of collecting new media.
"In many ways, new media is a form that came out of cultures unfriendly to the capitalist economics of accumulation," states Winet, referring to new media's roots in the alternative, artist-run organization. "No commodity was produced, and no acquisitive impulses triggered. The work was about process, experience, and dialog."
Barry Rosenberg, a Connecticut-based art consultant who advises his clients on purchasing new media thinks collectors need to learn to shift their focus more toward commissioning work, rather than buying, when supporting new media art.
"Collectors realize that the lack of ownership of new media art means there isn't the same 'value'," states Rosenberg. "But artists can also learn to sign their digital work, draw up written contracts to document their pieces, or create limited editions, and collectors can learn that archiving a digital work on a Web site is equal to physically archiving a paper print by an artist. There are a lot of possibilities."
