Video artists such as Matthew Barney, Moriko Mori, Stan Douglas and many others command astronomical sums for their work. You could see this as evidence that video art has entered the age of maturity and is actually ready to compete for the top prizes against media such as photography and painting. An attempt to bring video art into the market on a larger scale was made back in the 1970s by the New York gallery owner Leo Castelli among others. This failed at the time. TV was at least exciting and much more interesting than video art, so the argument ran. In the radical 1960s bourgeois art, fetishized by galleries and collectors for its market value, had to make way for an art that was more politicized. The power of the media and the materialism of the art world were denounced and it was considered self-evident that the commercial value or otherwise of a work of art was unimportant. This kind of idealism belongs to time past video art has indeed grown up . Today's video artists are not merely driven by rebelliousness or political commitment for today they are involved in productions involving money and investors. 'Untitled #29.95' tells of the history of video art which, so it is claimed, is largely a story of money and of the question whether art is a personal and private possession and of who in the end controls art. Why should only the rich be able to enjoy important works of art? A video work should cost $29.95 instead of $150. 000. It is time for the great video clearance sale. As a sort of Robin Hood, ®™Ark would like to distribute prohibitively expensive videos on the Internet. For video is just like shareware on the Internet, by everyone for everyone. The gallery owners will not lose any sleep over that. Each will take care of his own is their response. The size of an edition also determines its price and it is therefore perhaps rather too naive to expect that artists and their works can compete with commercial products like music video and music CD, or any other kind of reproducible medium.
– Miklós Beyer
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®tmark
Live and work in San Francisco (USA)
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