Fractal Art is Worthless

Why? Because you can't sell it!

Why not? Because Fractal Art, like all digital art, is easily reproduced, that is, displayed on a monitor or printed out -- again and again!

Need some more explanation? Digital Art is really a computer file. An oil painting is really -- an oil painting!

That's not enough? Here's another way to look at it: If I put on a beret and picked up a wooden palette with paints on it and took a brush and painted a fractal on a canvas, I could then turn around and sell that piece of fractal art. The person who bought it could say they own that piece of fractal art now and display it with confidence knowing that while talented forgers or even myself could make apparently similar works, they own "the original".

Okay. Here's more: If I make a fractal on my computer, the end result is actually an image file, or a parameter file which will reproduce the image on my monitor. That image file can spawn milllions of millions of identical images on computer monitors or in the out-tray of millions of millions of printers. In short: in digital art there is no original.

Consequently, there is nothing to sell or possess in the same way that one can sell or possess an oil painting or sculpture. Fractal Art is intangible. Which is to say, Fractal Art is simply digital.

It's actually a good thing from the perspective of viewers who can easily view digital imagery via the internet or buy a copy (but only a "copy"). But for collectors who like to possess a piece of artwork wholesale, digital art repels them.

Of course there are other art forms that "suffer" from this lack of possessability: Printmaking, Photography. Printmakers often number each print indicating the total number and then destroy the plate. Photographers could do something similar and then destroy the negative. But how many fractal artists will print out a limited amount, or just one copy, number each one like a print maker would, and then delete the image file that made it?

The reproducibility of digital art forms (don't forget music too, mp3s, Napster...) is just part of the nature of the genre and "copy-ability" is what defines it as much as anything else. And the only way to sell it in the way that traditional art forms are sold is to destroy it's digital-ness.

Technorati Tags: fractal art, fractals, digital art, art sales, art business, selling art, printmaking, photography, listen to the golden sage,