Working Digitally: Originals & Editions

With the digital art I do, I can't really sell an original. That original is a virtual file that can be copied easily and with no loss in quality. That original is not something you can hang on your wall. With film photography, one could at least still touch the physical original: the negative; with digital work the connection with something physical disappears until the virtual is deliberately retranslated into the physical through, for example, printing.

As much as my "original" is not something to touch or sell (though I suppose artists out there can try it), once it is printed onto something physical, the result is a print that can be made again and again. The work can be reproduced just as long as the file still exists and the printing methods still exist -- and the printing methods available allow for the prints to be made identically, over and over again. Unlike traditional printing methods, which had physical (though again not usually sellable) originals that could wear down over time, and which had processes that could vary the look of the prints just slightly from one to the next, the 1000th print of a digital work could very well look the same as the first.

The question becomes: "How many prints of my original work should I make?" The options include: A) only one, B) a limited edition; and C) an open edition, unlimited run. Options A and B are, for digital work, rather artificial. An artist would limit their run mainly to control the supply of their work and thereby (hopefully) increase the demand for it, or to cater to those art collectors out there who enjoy the exclusivity of owning the only version of a work out there (or one of the few versions, in the case of a limited run).

To limit the run of your work, digitally, can be a sound business decision. Philosophically, however, it is rather undemocratic, from a social equality standpoint.

A snippet from the preface of the book I'm reading is relevant, here:

"It was a point of honor with [good] writers to make the best of themselves available to the largest possible public at the lowest possible cost. John Ruskin, the greatest of all English writers on art, was wholeheartedly of that persuasion. The ideal of universal education was at hand: how could good writers address themselves to the privileged only?" -- John Russel, The Meanings of Modern Art

I am not interested in elitism, exclusionism, or in helping anyone feel particularly privileged in comparison to someone else. I am interested in delighting or interesting someone, in adding something to the world that enriches -- perhaps simply through that modern-day self-expression-through-purchase that seems so prevalent today. The chance that someone else in the world might own the same piece of art that you do is something I tend to view as something uniting, rather than dividing. The chance that that someone else will own everything else that you've chosen to purchase because it meant something to you is rather smaller.

This is why I hope to be able to function selling open edition prints rather than by artificially limiting my work to single or limited edition runs.