Living with Digital Art

Peter Aspden has a long consideration of the popularity of video or digital art among collectors today in the Financial Times. Even though the medium is 50 years old, there seems to be a gathering momentum for these works. Aspden talks to Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Anita Zabludowicz and Tony Podesta. Here Podesta explains the appeal:

Today he owns more than 300 digital works and enjoys the variety that they give to his collection. “When you buy OTC [‘Over The Couch’] art, it’s not always so easy to know where you are going to put it, and changing it becomes a big deal. We have 14 monitors installed in our home and a system that enables us to put on any piece on any one of them.” He says it was a considerable, but essential, investment. “If you ever feel in a certain mood for something, you can call it up, and that is how we live with it.”

This is perhaps the most consistent quality to be found in digital art – that it reflects the pace of the technological change that we are living through. “I suppose that the pigments and the paints that are used in painting today are more advanced than those of the Renaissance, but they are not of an entirely different kind. With digital art,” he says, “you get the way that technology is ever changing and advancing, in so many ways.”