Art Wants to be Ninety-Nine Cents
Scott Sona Snibbe discusses the App Store as a new distribution platform for interactive art:
Over the past few days my first three apps became available on the iTunes store: Gravilux, Bubble Harp, and Antograph. I’ve been dreaming of this day for twenty years: a day when, for the first time, we can enjoy interactive art as a media commodity no different from books, music, and movies. But is there a market for this new medium?
To my understanding, interactive media art has traditionally been difficult to distribute as well as acquire, so this opens up interesting new possibilities for artists. It’s also interesting how this distribution channel runs contrary to established principles like exclusivity and limited availability in the art market, as touched upon in the article:
Galleries asked to sell these works and I labored for several years to “box” the experiences into objects that could sell to collectors. But my heart wasn’t in it. I grew up with the Free Software Foundation’s maxim Information wants to be free, and it didn’t seem right to make an arbitrary decision to make an edition of three, five, or seven, of something that could be copied more easily than music or movies.
