An Introduction to Digital Art | Skillshare Blog
Explore the fundamentals of digital art, including tools that you'll need to get started, animation, software, and inspiration.
may even surpass the traditional market
The digital art market <anchor>may even surpass the traditional market</anchor> soon enough. Digital art from paintings to prints are in demand. Art auction destination Phillips's first "Paddles ON!" sale partnered with Tumblr to sell 20 digital and digitally-related works. The event saw 80% of the art sold at a fraction of the rate it would take to buy a classic piece. However, the sales and attendance numbers were promising enough for more events to come.
The market for computer-created artwork is growing - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/arts/international/on-screen-and-on-the-block-digital-artwork.html

- Share full article

Advertisement

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.

Supported by

Art

# On Screen and on the Block

By Scott Reyburn

- May 30, 2014

- Share full article



“NEXT, NEXT, NEXT,” by Evan Roth.Credit...Courtesy of Phillips

LONDON — Is digital art the next big thing in the contemporary art world?

At the moment, the market for art that’s created and displayed on a screen — as distinct from paintings, prints and photos that are generated digitally and then printed — is small. Phillips’s inaugural “Paddles ON!” sale of 20 digital and digitally-related works in New York last October, held in association with the image-posting site Tumblr, was the first such event to be held at an international auction house. It raised just $90,600 — enough to buy a few square inches of a Christopher Wool painting. The top price of $16,000 went for “Asymmetric Love Number 2,” a chandelier made out of CCTV cameras, by the American “anti-disciplinarian” artist Addie Wagenknecht.

Encouraged by high attendance and a selling rate of 80 percent per lot, Phillips and Tumblr will hold a second digital art sale, this time in London. The event, scheduled to run June 21 to July 3, will combine an online auction via the Paddle8 marketplace with a live sale at Phillips. It’s estimated to raise at least 53,600 pounds, or about $90,000, from 23 works, all by different artists working in a dizzying range of media, few of whom are known to mainstream contemporary art buyers.

Those featured include the Amsterdam-based artist Jonas Lund, who creates, among other things, digital abstracts; the more widely exhibited American artist Sara Ludy, who makes quietly unsettling digital photomontages; and Hannah Perry of Britain, who has been shown at the Saatchi Gallery and makes sight and sound installations incorporating flat-screen video monitors. The examples of their work and that of the other artists included in the sale are generally estimated at less than £5,000.

“We feel there’s been a disconnect between the art world and the tech world,” said Megan Newcome, Phillips’s director of digital strategy. “Younger collectors don’t find these works intimidating. They relate to them on a generational level. The market is still nascent, but this is a direction contemporary art is going in.”

Digital art, in its purest forms, is a complex, fast-changing, fuzzily bordered world that traces its origins back to Andy Warhol’s recently rediscovered images made on his Commodore Amiga home computer in the mid-1980s and other, less-famous artists who preceded him. Unlike the computer-generated paintings of fashionable artists like Mr. Wool and Wade Guyton, which now fetch millions at auction, digital art has been difficult to sell when it hasn’t been transferred to a more traditional medium. Tellingly, many of the digital images in Phillips’s auction have been printed on paper or aluminum.

There are plenty of people who remain skeptical about the commercial potential of art shown on a screen in a world of free downloading. “To have a proper market, you need works that are securely limited, signed and numbered,” said the London-based dealer David Juda, who is currently showing “The Arrival of Spring,” a series of Yorkshire landscapes David Hockney drew on an iPad in 2011 that have been downloaded and transferred to paper and aluminum. Mr. Juda has sold 80 of the smaller-size prints on paper, limited to an edition of 25, priced at $28,000 each.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Advertisement

## Site Index

## Site Information Navigation