Last night I went to an Images Festival talk, Moving Images for Sale, which was pitched as a discussion of the impact of the hot-as-Brueghel-illustrated-hell art market on video, film and interactive computer art. The moderator was Lisa Steele, Creative Director at Vtape, Toronto, and the participants were Chris Eamon, Curator of the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection, San Francisco, and Lori Zippay, Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.

As a grant-grown Canuck who had just returned from viewing some of the riches of one of the largest US private art collections, Miami’s Rubell Family Collection, I was, to be frank, intrigued by the ways that the massive art market in the States worked, and was hoping Zippay and Eamon, as high-rolling Yanks, could indulge my shallow interest in the cold hard cash aspect of the video art life. While the conversation ended up tending more to technical conservation issues than my desired money-grubbing ones, there was a terrific case study presented of an artist critiquing the commercial art system even as he participated in it. I thought I’d share it here as an example of some much needed art a la snark.
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