Internet | Outside The Lines

Addie Wagenknecht’s ‘Asymmetric Love Number 2’ is in good company with Jeff Koons and Chuck Close as Lindsay Howard and the Paddles ON! crew gets a ‘le shout-out’ in this month’s Vanity Fair France! Digital art is captivating, provocative and out of the ordinary, but is it profitable? Even though some people are eager to spend millions of dollars to acquire fine art pieces from auction houses,

it is hard to imagine spending this kind of money and walking away with only a GIF or JPEG file. Nevertheless, demand for digital art continues to grow and even though it has a long ways to go before it reaches the steep price tags seen in the contemporary art marketplace, Phillips auction house recently proved that people are willing to pay big bucks for digital works of art.

Phillips art auction house, in partnership with blogging platform Tumblr and online art auction house Paddle8, recently put on an event called, “Paddles ON! The world’s first major commercial auction of work by digital artists.” On the Tumblr site, Paddles ON! is described as an exhibition and auction that brings together artists who are using digital technologies to establish the next generation of contemporary art.

The auction was a success. It drew a large audience and brought in nearly one-hundred thousand dollars in sales. According to an article in Complex Art+Design, some of the high sellers included:

$16,000 – Aymmetric Love Number 2, an angular chandelier made of security cameras
$15,000 – Pixel, a wall sculpture
$11,000 – Americans!, a software-drive animation

Seeing the profitable nature of digital art was not only exciting for the sellers. For Phillips auction house and others involved with Paddles ON!, it marked a defining moment in the evolution of contemporary art. Auction curator Lindsay Howard says, “For 20 years it’s been universities and non-profit organizations that have been the primary support system for digital art.” With great enthusiasm and high earnings, it is believed that the for-profit auction may be another place where digital artists can go to display and sell their work.

It looks like a new day is dawning for digital artists, as well as Phillips auction house. Phillips, which was founded by Harry Phillips who once served as senior clerk to James Christie of Christie’s auction house, is well positioned to dominate the digital art market. Being smaller than Christie’s and Sotheby’s allows Phillips to take on the risk of selling digital art. From the success of this first auction, it seems hosting digital artwork could come with great reward.

The future of digital art sales is uncertain but Phillips and Tumblr will continue to paddle on. The art auction goes to London next.

Read more Segmation blog posts about digital art

Inspiring Digital Art

“The Pixel Painter”

Marketing Art in the Digital World: An Introduction

Be an Artist in 2 minutes with Segmation SegPlay® PC (see more details here)

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The Internet is a powerful marketing tool for artists. A well-constructed website can reap thousands of viewers per day from all over the globe, all of whom can become potential collectors of your work.

To set up a website to display your art, you have several choices: you can do it yourself, you can hire a web designer to do it for you, or you can post your art onto an online artist gallery. Each of these three choices comes with its own pros and cons. Read through these descriptions to decide with route is best for you:

1.) Build your own website: If you are computer savvy, you can create your own website by registering a domain name, selecting a web host, and then building your site using a program such as Dreamweaver or Frontpage. This is the most time-consuming option, because if you don’t already know how to use these programs then you will have to learn them from scratch. These programs can be quite costly, but there are also some free WSYIWYG editors available, such as KompoZer. On the plus side, building your own website allows you complete control of how your work will be presented to the public.

2.) Hire a website designer: If you are pressed for time but you have a big enough budget, you can considering hiring a professional to design your website. Hiring a website designer will usually cost several hundred dollars, depending on the size and complexity of your website. Many designers charge per page. The benefits of hiring a website designer is that the site we will be built a lot more quickly than if you had to learn HTML, CSS and any other necessary computer languages from scratch. A good website designer will know how to present your artwork in the best way possible, using a clean and professional layout. This is something you might struggle with if you try to create a website on your own. Lastly, any decent website designer will also be well-versed in SEO (which we will cover in a future blog post), which is invaluable in generating traffic to your site.

3.) Post your work on an online artist gallery: An online artist gallery is an extensive website that artists can join (either for free or for a fee) to create a profile upload photos of their art. Examples of online artist galleries include ArtMajeur, ArtSpan, and d’Art. These sites tend to have free and paid versions, with extra perks for paying members. This is by far the least favorable of the three available options, because it means that your work will essentially be lost amongst all the other 10s of 1000s of artworks. If you want any degree of web traffic from these types of sites, you will need to become a paying member.

In conclusion, if you want to gain a wider audience for your art through the Internet, then your best bet is to either build your own website or hire a website designer to build one for you.
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