$8,793 Worth of [Digital] Art

merkske_waelder_worth01.jpgIn art critic Pau Waelder's ebook, titled $8,793 Worth of [Digital] Art, he pairs each of the 159 images of works of art lifted directly from the online art marketplace S[edition]'s storefront with either an authentic or unauthentic "certificate of authenticity," which is intended to only be given upon the official purchase of each copy of an art piece by an individual.  However, a simple flaw in the website presentation allowed Waelder to reproduce the certificate – a blank example copy for each art piece is shown on the website proper, which Waelder copied and used to forge some of the certificates in his collection while the rest he officially purchased.  These copies are indistinguishable from the real deal, forcing the reader to distrust what they see on the page as fact – an obvious metaphor for what debatably constitutes as "owning an official piece of art" in the contemporary digital landscape.

Indeed, if one were to compare this certificate with any featured on S[edition]'s website, can any difference be found? (Save for the art and artists' names, of course.)

The Sheep Market

[video src=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mmb5aSscck] Aaron Koblin’s The Sheep Market is a web-based artwork that uses the ‘Amazon Mechanical Turk’ system to get thousands of workers involved in the creation of a massive database of drawings. The artist’s inspiration for ‘The Sheep Market’ was to try to exploit human creativity, while at the same time shedding light on the insignificant role each worker plays as part of a whole.  But Koblin was mostly curious how workers would respond to his absurd task: “When I saw the first sheep come through the system I knew I had made the right decision. As I had hoped each sheep truly reflected the individual and humanity behind it.”