Video Art and the Market
In a 1998 New York Times article, entitled “An Uncertain Market for Video Art,” John G. Hanhardt, then a newly appointed media curator for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, remarked that “many of the best young artists are working in video, but for some collectors it’s still a challenge. This is a medium that people know as television. Also, you can copy the tapes, which is its most radical idea.’’¹
Flash forward to early 2019 when MutualArt published the article, “How Video Art is Beginning to Change the Market…” After 21 years, the editorial bent for video art’s marketability had only managed a marginal improvement from “uncertain” to “beginning.” Although the MutualArt author did identify tangible progress for video art’s recognition in museum, gallery, and even Turner Prize conversations, she nonetheless arrived at a sobering conclusion with the admission that “even the most highly acclaimed video artists do not command the market power of artists in other media.”² As an example, the MutualArt article cited Bill Viola’s video installation, Eternal Return (2000), which sold for £377,600 at Phillips London in 2006, achieving a record price for the medium. Though perhaps not a terrible result for a 2006 auction, this genre-defining, biennale-headlining, seminal video masterpiece (which the Royal Academy compared to sculptures by Michelangelo)³ was still easily surpassed by a mundane Richard Prince Joke painting in the same sale.⁴ The author’s grudging acknowledgment of this disparity precipitates a series of hand-wavy incantations about “the blockchain” and “decentralized crypto-tracking:” a desperate ward to protect video art against Hanhardt’s “radical idea” of copying the tapes.
Indeed, video art has become a focal point for discussions about art’s authenticity and the need for market protections to secure the value of “original” art objects. It’s clear that one of the primary motivations for collecting art is the possession of a rare piece of cultural history with lasting exclusivity: privileged access to a private experience. If not scarce, then not worth much, the axiom goes, and video art certainly isn’t scarce if it inevitably winds up on YouTube.
An even more elementary fear dissuading some collectors from purchasing video art is the prospect of being duped into buying a fake, or a forgery. Video artworks obviate the connoisseur’s keen eye for physical evidence in attribution. The likeness of a copied digital file to its original depends solely on the data quality of the impression, and unlike physical print runs, digital copies permit true, indistinguishable perfection. Yuki Terase, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art for Asia, recently acknowledged that “while it’s easy to detect a fake painting, the only way to determine whether a video work is the original is the artist’s certificate.”⁵
Even so, the medium of video, much like music, photography, and other mainstream digital file formats, has a long history under the auspices of keen-eyed authenticating bodies, especially in contexts outside of fine art. Ever since the 1999 launch of Napster, digital files have been subject to intense scrutiny by powerful corporations with vested financial interests in their dissemination. Google’s Youtube and Facebook’s Instagram platforms, for example, work tirelessly to track and dismantle video content posted by unauthorized users who would profit from copyrighted material. Yet the digital video content created for such popular applications as film trailers and music videos can be cheaply and broadly licensed, and shared without limitation in private, nonprofit, or educational contexts, all entirely within the law, not to mention the infinitely metastasizing gray market channels for ripped copies. To wit, we found a low-quality installation-view recording of Eternal Return on YouTube within twelve seconds (pictured below). No, we don’t feel the same sense of awe we might have experienced had we purchased and installed the piece to its full specifications, but we did, in fact, watch and enjoy the whole thing. How, then, can an authentic digital art file ever be expected to retain its value? Should major collectors band together and demand that YouTube protect the sanctity of their purchases?
Perhaps, however, the issue of protecting copies isn’t so dire. After all, the circumstances that allow us to enjoy a bootleg copy of Eternal Return aren’t so different from the conditions that allow anyone else to enjoy high-resolution reproductions of a privately owned painting or sculpture. Consider the following parallel example: say we went to visit New York’s Brooklyn Museum in the summer of 2019, and, inspired by the collection, we purchased a large-format poster of Francis Bacon’s Pope (1958) from the gift shop. Several months later, to offset growing costs and enrich the collection, the museum decided to deaccession the painting at auction (this part is a true story).⁶ Perhaps, having paid almost $7 million, the painting’s new owner, not to mention the artist’s estate manager, would prefer that we not print thousands of copies of our poster and sell them at a huge markup in Times Square (this part isn’t a true story). Legally, the artist’s estate could take us to court, because the work is not yet registered to the public domain.⁷ The odds of this suit ever occurring, however, are infinitesimally small. Every single day, physical artworks are copied, not just in print formats, but in recreations, reproductions, reimaginings, and every other conceivable form of rip-off. The cases of infringement are too many and too unimportant to enforce. Does Eternal Return’s present owner really mind that we’ve seen the entire video on YouTube? Probably not. The value of this work isn’t any lower because of our unsanctioned access.
Obviously, none of these examples can fairly approximate the thorny conundrum wherein a valuable piece of video art gets copied bit-for-digital-bit and sold to two buyers, initiating a challenging debate over the identity of the true original. In this corner case, digital art truly stands alone as the most indistinguishable and vulnerable medium. This eventuality, however, remains the rarest and riskiest form of forgery because the dual buyers need only encounter news of one another to discover the deceit. For other types of forgery, where completely unique fake works are produced in the style of a deceased master, à la M. Knoedler & Co. in 2011, video art is likely a trickier target than even the most intricately-technical paintings.⁸ Why? Simply because video art is more recent. Produced mostly within the past 30 years, video art benefits from unprecedented public access to records, files, and receipts. Paintings, especially works by old masters, can theoretically lie abandoned in attics for decades accumulating benefit of the doubt. But it would be troublesome, indeed, to pawn off a “newly discovered” Bill Viola without a single previous record of its existence. Video art is also inherently difficult to fake because famous works are primarily unveiled via well-attended and documented screenings or premieres, where corroboration of authenticity becomes unavoidable.
Setting these debates aside, it is eminently clear that video art will someday occupy a position of equal footing alongside other fine art media, if not by assuaging traditional collectors’ concerns, then by ingratiating itself to a new generation of digitally-native artists and buyers. Look no further than 2018’s shortlist of Turner Prize candidates, all of whom worked in digital media and video.⁹ Major players in the contemporary art scene, whose works command lofty yet stable prices on the public and private markets, are increasingly competent and comfortable switching between digital and physical media. Artists like Petra Cortright and Ryan Trecartin blend digital production techniques with analog installations and multimedia performances, transcending the notion that digital art must shuffle demurely back and forth between monitor and hard drive.¹⁰ In the vast and expanding universe of contemporary art and postmodern collector tates, there is no enduring economic reason, other than institutional stubbornness, for video art to remain a depressed asset.
[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/15/arts/an-uncertain-market-for-video-art.html
[2]:https://www.mutualart.com/Article/How-Video-Art-is-Beginning-to-Change-the/E61B6D9087320879
[3]:https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/bill-viola-michelangelo
[4]:https://www.phillips.com/auctions/auction/UK010106
[5]:https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-video-art-form-moment
[6]:https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2019/contemporary-art-evening-n10149/lot.23.html
[7]:https://fairuse.stanford.edu/law/us-code/
[8]:https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/arts/design/knoedler-art-gallery-in-nyc-closes-after-165-years.html
[9]:https://hyperallergic.com/474039/the-2018-turner-prize-focuses-on-video-art-in-political-times/
[10]:https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/arts/design/01kenn.html, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/petra-cortright-on-self-isolation-zoom-mania-and-her-early-webcam-works-82752
