[schrijver]

The art market is already using the internet to great effect. Like you write in your article, many of the gallery sales are now online. Work can even be sold in advance of the physical exposition opening.

However, if one might be tempted to correlate internet-based business with openness and even educational inspirations: that’s not the commercial art world I know of. Because in most of these cases collectors will have had a password to the restricted part of the gallery website.

That entire $60B art market is in a continuous effort to make scarce and unreachable what is at the basis an abundant resource. Hence the passwords handed out to selected collectors. Or, for example, what’s the logic of taking an image with a digital camera, and promising to print it only 5 times? It’s an economic logic of promoting scarcity, and it works really well—contemporary art auctions have gone through the roof this year.

At the same time, as art is moving to digital artefacts, the notion of scarcity on which the art world is built is bound to blow up at some point—like you, I’m confident that the internet will help us come up with new ideas of what it is to be an artist, and what it is to produce art. Yet the gallery circuit is the last place where I’d go looking for answers…