S [edtion] Art

Art author and expert, Etan Jonathan Ilfeld, introduces Sedition; a unique digital auction house.

As Walter Benjamin has pointed out, art that is mechanically reproducible is perceived differently than traditional art such as painting. Not surprisingly, it took a while until photography was considered high art, and began selling for considerable prices at auction houses (e.g. Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #96, 1981, sold in 2011 for $3.89 million). Video-art has faced similar challenges, but thanks to digital technology, video-art is becoming democratized and affordable. Putting a price on a film has always been complex. Although cinemas have commodified the feature film such that the same ticket price will apply to a $200M blockbuster as it will to a low-budget independent film, the pricing of video-art remains elusive and transient. 

Traditionally, video-art followed in the footsteps of photography and featured a limited edition series, where the price of each piece increased with the sale of each additional piece so that the last piece in an edition is the most expensive. However, it was a lot easier to collect, preserve, and display photography than it was video-art, which requires electricity and maintaining a technology that can quickly fall out of date (e.g. VCR Cassettes).

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