COLLECTING VIDEO ART

COLLECTING VIDEO ART

by Kipton Cronkite

 
When it comes to collecting contemporary art, we have definitely entered the digital era. From Nam June Paik to Bill Viola, from Bruce Nauman to Pipilotti Rist, video art has been in the forefront of this esthetic revolution. "Video art is no longer perceived as a separate category," said Whitney Museum curator Henriette Huldisch. "Collecting film and video art is definitely no longer in its infancy, most major institutions have fully embraced it and many major private collectors do as well."
Among the first collectors in this new field were Richard and Pamela Kramlich, who have been buying video and "new media art" since the 1980s and now have a collection of over 60 video installations and hundreds of works in other media. Their collection was profiled at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000, with an accompanying catalogue. A survey of their holdings, Prime Mover: Five Exhibitions from the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection, is due out this summer from Steidl.
"The Kramlichs began collecting video art fairly early, and so were able to obtain some great works," said Christopher Eamon, curator of the Kramlich Collection and author ofPrime Mover. "In the past eight years we’ve tried to put together a historical survey of the 40-year history of the medium via the very best examples of contemporary film and video art."
In 1997, the Kramlichs founded New Art Trust in San Francisco to support research and preservation of video and other time-based media art, collaborating with the Bay Area Video Coalition to establish a video and audio preservation center. The New Art Trust has also collaborated with the San Francisco MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate in London to develop exhibitions as well as programs in education and conservation of digital artworks.
When it comes to video art, however, being embraced by the art world isn’t the same as receiving unqualified love. The passion for video art is often tempered by considerations of money and logistics. "Video remains less collectable than, say, painting or drawing," said the Whitney’s Huldisch. "Video art poses its own demands on museums, notably raising issues revolving around the requirements of complicated electronic equipment."
Unlike paintings and sculptures, the technology of video art changes every five or ten years, and often the works must be migrated or upgraded to the newer technology. "Obsolescence of media is probably the most detrimental factor in preserving new media," says Mona Jimenez, a professor and specialist in video preservation at New York University.
What’s more, video and digital art continues to evolve, presenting ever more complicated questions of exhibition and display. Recently, the Museum of Modern Art presented a new video by Doug Aitken titled Sleepwalkers -- projected during the evening hours on MoMA’s exterior walls. Notable for its scale and finish, the seven-screen projection attracted crowds of viewers to the sidewalks around the museum, despite frigid February temperatures.
"Doug’s work was designed to be projected on multiple facades of midtown skyscrapers," said Creative Time president Anne Pasternak, who helped organize the event. Through its display of Sleepwalkers, MoMA was able to integrate the realms of art and the everyday to a degree rarely before achieved.
Such large-scale exhibitions of video art are likely to become more common. Last summer, a 92-minute-long video focusing on soccer star Zinedine Zidane, a collaboration between artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, was presented during Art Basel on a screen set up in an outdoor soccer stadium. A living portrait of one of the world’s great soccer players, the film chronicles a single game (Real Madrid vs. Villarreal), and has recently been given its first large-scale screening in New York at the Guggenheim Museum.
Even more "conservative" museums have added video and new media to their collecting repertoire. The Metropolitan Museum of Art -- which acquired its first work of video art in 2001 -- is currently presenting "Closed Circuit" Feb. 23-Apr. 29, 2007, a selection from its growing video holdings.
And video art is beginning to register in the competitive auction market as well. A television sculpture from 1990 by Nam June Paik sold at Christie’s Honk Kong in 2006 for a record $275,000, while a complicated video installation by Doug Aitken, Electric Earth (1999), sold at Phillips, de Pury & Co. in 2004 for $114,000. More typically, DVD versions of videos by younger artists can be had from art galleries for less than $10,000.
Increasingly, video and digital art is accepted as a collectible art form. "We decided to collect video art because at the time no one was doing it in our community," said Pamela Kramlich. "It fit well with Dick’s business activities in the new technologies sector. But above and beyond that, video really is the art of our time. It’s become a second language to an entire new generation of artists." Thanks in part to the efforts of foundations such as New Art Trust, video is certain to continue to advance and develop as a medium for new art.  
KIPTON CRONKITE operates KiptonArt.com, which helps emerging artists exhibit their works in public spaces.

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/cronkite/cronkite3-15-07.asp