“You’re not just collecting a piece of art,” says the co-founder of LumiereVR about XR art, “you’re collecting a world.”
What does Jenny Guo think about when she thinks about digital art? Most simply: accessibility. Of course, as an XR art collector and co-founder of LumiereVR, she’s tuned in to the “core voice and values” of digital artists and the “authenticity and sincerity” they impart to a piece of work, but what’s as meaningful to her, she tells Jing Culture & Commerce, is the medium’s demographic-defying reach, extending as it does “an invitation to everyone.”
Vital to this accessibility, she notes, is distribution. As an example, Guo recalls LumiereVR’s 2020 presentation of Chinese artist Xin Liu’s VR installation, “Living Distance: An Outer Space Performance,” for which the studio sought not showings at galleries or cultural institutions, but exhibitions at film festivals. It became the first Chinese work to be shown at Sundance, where, she says, it was “able to reach out to a different audience with different reactions to the work.”
As with VR, so too with NFTs. “NFTs are definitely interesting to me; they’re less to do with artwork than distribution,” she says. “Before the NFT hype, it was very hard to sell digital art, but now, I’ve been witnessing a lot of digital artists who are able to sell some work.”
In fact, the increased appetite and demand for digital collectibles over the past number of months haven’t just forced galleries and auction houses to contend with the crypto sphere, but has left the door open for a new generation of art collectors. Young, online, and culturally omnivorous, these new buyers are set to disrupt art creation, commerce, curation, and collection. “I already see the attitude shifting even within the community,” says Guo. “People are now looking for curators who understand this shift — not necessarily just the value behind digital art, but also the culture because the demographics are different.”
This emerging buyer class was a focus of Guo’s June 9 talk at the Digital Art Collector Summit presented by Larry’s List, at which she underscored how the tastes and behaviors of today’s collectors are poised to reshape tomorrow’s digital sales and phygital experiences. Below, she shares more with JCC about this new age of digital collecting. Continue to read the full article here
