*Hmmm. That gets a lot more interesting as it goes on.
Alessio Chierico: Do you think that on-line platforms for selling art are good for the market, or do they need something else if they are to be effective?
Pau Waelder: There are different kind of platforms, that have various business models, but nobody has yet reached “Eldorado”; nobody has found the perfect strategy. Platforms like Artsy, that I mentioned previously, are managing to bring art to the collectors. I’m not sure how well they are working, but I think that they have long-term plans. If you want to sell an artwork from a gallery to people in any part of the world, then Artsy is just fine. According to a study of the online art market, it seems that people are not willing to buy anything that is more expensive than ten thousand pounds on it.
People do buy art which they haven’t see in person, but they will not spend more than that that amount of money on it. This study says that most of the people who buy art online purchase paintings, prints, or photographs. That is quite logical, because they are two-dimensional works that you can see very well on the screen. It is also interesting to consider what happens, when an artwork is in a digital format, and the screen is its natural environment. It is easy enough to sell a painting, because it is one single object that has been signed by someone and has been executed by hand; you cannot fake it. But if the artwork is a file, it can be distributed widely and readily copied. Every copy is thereby identical to the original. The same problem exists with video art. Its collectors don’t know what are they buying, because they buy a copy of an artwork that will one day become obsolete.
Some collectors have purchased VHS videos that don’t function after a certain period of time….
