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November 19, 1998

arts@large
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL Bio

Putting a Price Tag on Digital Art

How much is that Degas in the browser window?

Money is a subject that few in the art world will discuss openly, and the topic becomes even more challenging when the focus is on digital art, a genre so new and unusual that sale prices and other decimal points of reference are nearly impossible to come by.

As digital art slowly gains acceptance from museums and other arbiters of cultural taste, the issue of "Net worth" is emerging as a complex one. At the same time, a few artists are beginning to challenge the notion that Web-based works are without value because no one knows what kind of price tag to hang on them.


"Vertical Blanking Interval," a work by Vivian Selbo, is one of the works on the äda'web site, which the Walker Art Center will acquire.

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is a case in point. On Friday, the museum will announce its acquisition of the complete archives of äda'web, the pioneering exhibition space for original online art. The äda'web archives will serve as the centerpiece of the Walker's new digital-art study collection, also to be unveiled on Friday as part of a broad and visionary program that establishes the museum as the leader in high-tech cultural initiatives.

The äda'web site, which features online works by Jenny Holzer, Lawrence Weiner and others, increasingly appears to be one of the landmarks of the digital-art era -- so much so that "The Unreliable Archivist," a clever new piece on the Walker site, uses äda'web as its raw materials.

Yet trying to assign a dollar value to äda'web has been a worthless exercise to date.

The site, which has not been updated since its publisher, Digital City Inc., stopped funding the three-year-old project earlier this year, is being donated to the Walker. This charitable gesture will result in no tax benefits for Digital City because the firm has been unable to determine the site's value, according to äda'web co-founder John Borthwick, who is now vice president of product development and programming at AOL Studios, the America Online division responsible for Digital City.

Borthwick said, "We spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to get the donation done and assign a value, and then at the end we said, okay, let's just go ahead and do it."

As part of the unsuccessful effort to get an independent appraisal of the site's worth, Borthwick recalled, the äda'web staff approached Christie's, but the venerable auction house declined to take on the task.

"Since there is no objective measure for value, us assigning the value is really hard," Borthwick said. "You either check the value by putting things out to the open market and having people bid against them, or by getting somebody who is willing to establish some kind of an objective measure and say, 'I believe the Jenny Holzer project, because of its relationship to her previous work, is worth this [much].' But we couldn't find anybody who would do that."

The value of äda'web has been gauged at least twice before, although no one believes either figure represents the site's true worth. Borthwick said that when Digital City acquired äda'web and two other sites in February 1997, its value was arbitrarily set for accounting purposes at a third of the transaction price, which has never been disclosed.

A few weeks before that sale, an earlier version of äda'web, as well as two other, unrelated Web sites, were donated to the architecture and design collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Aaron Betsky, the collection's curator, said the sites were initially valued at $500 each and have not been assessed since.

"Since these are the only copies of the sites in a particular state [of their development], they do not yet have much value, though I assume they may some day," Betsky said. "We certainly think they will be invaluable once people realize what has been lost as the Web careens on to the ever-new."


The Web-based work "If You Want to Clean Your Screen" by Olia Lialina is for sale on her Art.Teleportacia site.

Kathy Halbreich, the Walker's director, said her institution does not attach a dollar value to the donations it receives. That way, the giver, not the museum, is responsible for justifying any amounts claimed as tax deductions. Nor, she said, will the museum now assign a price for insurance purposes. "What would you insure?" she asked. "The crashing of the site?"

Halbreich maintained that the dollar value of äda'web is irrelevant to the Walker.

"Our delight in this acquisition has nothing to do with monetary value and everything to do with being able to shelter what I believe will be among the most important historical precedents for digital art," she said. "So, for us, it was really the intellectual and artistic value that was delightful. It didn't matter to us if it had a high monetary value or no monetary value."

Nevertheless, Halbreich affirmed that the assessment process would have been a difficult one.

"Usually we have a pretty good idea [of a work's value] from auction records," she said. "There is no market yet for what äda'web represents, and I think that's why it was impossible for them to put a value on it."

A few Web-savvy artists are striving to establish such a market.

In July, Olia Lialina launched Art.Teleportacia, an online gallery that sells Internet-based works by Lialina, Vuk Cosic and three other artists. Deliberately overwrought curatorial comments have been appended to each work, but Lialina insisted that the venture was a serious one.

Prices for each piece are about $2,000, a figure arrived at though common sense, Lialina explained in a telephone interview from her Moscow home. A fee of a few hundred dollars, which she said is sometimes paid as an honorarium when a Web work is included in an exhibit, seemed too low. If she charged $20,000, she said, "it would look like a joke. But $2,000, I like this."

Lialina has had no buyers yet, but she said she is close to snaring one. Meanwhile, she is planning to expand the gallery early next year with an exhibition of about 10 new works.

Because Web works can be effortlessly duplicated, their value has sometimes been viewed as limited. Barbara London, the Museum of Modern Art's associate curator of film and video, dismissed that argument as outdated.

"A tape of Bill Viola's or Nam June Paik's that has been broadcast, anybody and everybody could have copied it with their VCR," London said. "It's not like having a Picasso painting where it's truly, truly unique. We know these are in effect easily reproducible multiples."

Lialina said each project's unique URL would serve to authenticate it and preserve its value. A buyer has a number of options for collecting a work, ranging from keeping it accessible on the Web to storing it in a private online location.



Holger Friese and Max Kossatz sold "www.antworten.de" to a German collector last month.
Her site also allows visitors to post comments, many of which remark upon the uneasy intersection of art and commerce. "In some weeks, something will be sold," Lialina asserted. "And after, everybody will start to buy and buy and buy and buy, and it will be [considered] the usual thing. But at this moment, getting a lot of response and information and opinions on the eve of first sale is very important. It will be my present to future historians."

Last month, the Berlin-based graphic designer Holger Friese and Max Kossatz, a webmaster in Vienna, sold their Web-based work www.antworten.de ("answer") to a German collector, a transaction that included rights to the domain and a hard drive with all the necessary code in place.

Friese declined to identify the buyer further or to reveal the price paid, but he said he set the amount based on his normal fees for commercial Web projects. He is also selling a limited-edition disk-based version of his unendlich, fast... ("infinite, almost") for 460 marks (about $300).

With these first steps, Internet-based works may be starting to escape the assessment that, because they do not have a price, they are worthless.


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"I would like to break the back [of that statement] because I believe it's really pernicious, and it's a very bald capitalist equation," the Walker's Halbreich said. "There are other criteria by which we assign values in institutions such as this."

She continued: "I know museum directors have to raise money, I know museum directors talk profusely about money, I know museum directors scream about money. But ultimately I hope that's not really what is the animating force in any of our institutions."


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