Interesting story in the sunday NYTimes about collectors living with video art.

Yet, as the first generation of video collectors is discovering, video remains a confounding, ornery medium - especially when it’s placed between the silver-framed vacation snapshots and the door that leads to the laundry room. Most artworks sit, mute and distinguished, on a mantel or behind a couch. Video pieces demand attention, and they never blend into the background the way even the most monumental Rothko or vibrantly colored Stella can.

[…]

THE first odd thing about collecting video art is this: the medium came into being partly because artists wanted to make work that couldn’t be collected. It was born in 1965 when Sony introduced the first portable video camera, attracting artists like Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Joan Jonas and Vito Acconci. “The dream we had was art that couldn’t be sold, but broadcast on television,” the video artist Bill Viola said in a recent phone interview.

By the 1980’s, however, dealers and artists were turning video into a commodity. Now prices range from a few thousand dollars to six figures.

If collectors are figuring out how to collect and live with video art, it seems a simple matter to expand that habit to encompass digital, software and/or networked art. Some software art is already easily collected since it can run locally from a computer (John F. Simon Jr. is mistakenly referred to as a video artist in the article). To the collector there is no difference: they need a deck to play the video; they need a computer to output video. In both cases there is one appliance to output the media to a display.

[…] technicians are familiar presences for anyone who owns video art. Each time a new piece is installed chez Kramlich, electricians are brought in to snake audio, video and power lines to the location and punch new sockets into the walls.

With networked art there is an additional requirement to consider: the internet connection. But if committed collectors are willing to go through the hassle of hiring techs to install new video pieces, it’s a small step to adding an ethernet cable or wireless network to support the art work. permanent link to this post