Pets, Not Plants
When a collector decides to purchase a new media work, he or she enters into an unusually close relationship with the art. At the simplest level this is because, despite all the technological developments, much new media art needs to be installed with great care and sensitivity to its physical surroundings and demands regular maintenance due to its technical complexity. This is not simply a case of buying a painting and hanging in on the wall. The difference between owning new media art and older forms is not unlike the difference between keeping pets and plants. “Things can go wrong,” says Sacks. “And depending on the complexity of the work, many things can go wrong. But the magic of the piece doesn’t exist without that.”

For Michael Katchen, senior archivist at Franklin Furnace, who has been involved in drawing up and promoting the Variable Media Questionnaire (see "Conserving Pixels, Bits, and Bytes" by Jacquelyn Lewis), which records artists’ criteria for preserving their new media works, feels that the safeguards for the future maintenance of new media works are not only appropriate in institutions, with their legal and conservation departments, but in private collections as well. Often it’s not just a question of switching the thing on and off.

And yet, at the same time an increasing number of artists are making art that is still worth looking at when it is switched off. Daniel Rozin, whose reactive sculptures “see” and “reflect” people and things that pass in front of them, and who has a show at bitforms next month, points out, “If you walk into a room and see this [work] on the wall when it’s switched off, you will still appreciate it.” No wonder, because these new media pieces are also beautiful objects, whether they consist of arrangements of wooden rods, lattices of tiny laminated prints, or suspended silk screens.

Private vs. Public
Another reason why new media work is now being collected more widely is that, for the private collector at any rate, the limits of the media are now comprehensible. (In fact, there seems little point in even calling them “new” anymore, which has led to the adoption of the term “variable media,” which encompasses all ephemeral mediums, including performance art.)

Remember art that was intended to exist purely on the Internet? Since at least 2003, many artists who apply for Franklin Furnace’s “Future of the Present” grants to make “live art on the Internet” have envisioned a physical outcome or locale for their work. In little more than a decade, the utopian musings about an art without physical boundaries, constraints, or even existence, so common in the 1990s, have largely disappeared. Or rather, even if that sort of work still exists, it has not found its way into many private collections.

And as far as some experts are concerned, this is just as well, because it has become obvious that some sorts of new media art are more suited to private collections than others. Private ownership, like copyright, Katchen argues, actually reduces the safety of work that exists purely as computer code. “Get it out in as many examples as possible,” he says, “rather than have just a single copy that might get lost. Because then the work is gone.”

Sacks agrees: “I feel that you don’t want to put too many constraints on that art form. It’s public art. When it’s out there, it’s out there. I don’t think you should constrain it to the rules of the art world.”

Still, while for many people “out there” is precisely where the most exciting new media art is being made, there is clearly room for both private and public work. “I don’t think it’s a question of one or the other,” says Sacks. “It depends on the scope of the project, and it depends on the artist’s agenda.”

“Obviously I’m biased, but to me, this is the most relevant art being made today.”