Who Buys Digital Art—And Why
Why would anyone want to buy a piece of digital art?
Unlike paintings or prints, you cannot touch a digital image, and displaying such works — for your own enjoyment or to show off to others — does not have an obvious mechanics (more below). Other ephemeral media like video or theater involve a sustained narrative experience that makes the price of the ticket worth it, but that is rarely a feature of a broad range of digital objects and images that can now be purchased.
The digital art marketplaces that have sprung up in the past couple of years— superrare.co, knownorigin.io, etc — promise new income streams for a new type of artist. Many hopefuls might conceivably be game to offering their digital creations for sale online, but it is unclear whether enough buyers exist to make such marketplaces viable. We created a survey as a lead-up to the SXSW panel “Value And Art In A Tokenized World,” on which I was a speaker, to gather more information on the motivations of people who already own digital art.
When asked why they collect, 35% of respondents volunteered they were themselves artists — a number high enough to suggest the demand side of this marketplace is indeed too tiny to live up to the dreamy claims of ‘democratizing’ art. At least for now.
Overview
- I had expected a majority to be…
