So why is downloading art so great?
Art lovers of all ages and backgrounds are in completely different places regarding their experiences with downloadable art. On one hand, some galleries and private homes are decorated entirely with displays of downloadable art. On the other hand, many art lovers have not yet purchased a single downloadable art work. Kling Collective wants to help all art lovers enjoy the benefits of downloadable art. We feel downloadable art is an entirely new paradigm for how the world collects and shares art. High quality, downloadable art has several unique strengths that don’t appear in any other medium.
I’m not just talking about reproducibility, though that’s certainly part of it. Paintings have always been reproducible. Leonardo DaVinci likely painted two versions of the Mona Lisa and it has been copied countless times since, perhaps most notably by Raphael. But each of those reproductions took many hours of painstaking work by hand. And the end result of all that careful effort is one copy. For most of human history, copying a work of art required just as much time and effort as it took to create the original work. And the quality of the reproduction depended entirely on the talent of the person holding the paintbrush. That made high quality copies rare and expensive. Expensive enough to be out of reach for anyone who wasn’t an aristocrat or (later) a successful merchant. Now, of course, downloadable art can be duplicated perfectly and almost instantly. Whereas a high quality hand-painted copy took weeks or months to make, downloadable art can be copied many times a day without losing quality.
Another advantage is built in to the act of downloading itself. Art can now be shared quicker and safer than ever before. I’ll reference the Mona Lisa again for contrast. The Mona Lisa has been on display at the Louvre since 1804 (after spending the previous 4 years in Napoleon’s bedroom across the Seine at the Tuileries), except for when it toured the museums of Italy in 1913 after having been stolen in 1910. It was returned in a special compartment of the Milan-Paris Express on New Year’s Eve 1913. Mona Lisa then toured the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and the Met in New York (this time with permission) in 1963. Finally, in 1974, it visited the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Tokyo National Museum. It traveled in a special air-conditioned container surrounded by conservators from the Louvre. Once on display in Tokyo, a woman attacked the Mona Lisa with red spray paint as an act of protest. Fortunately, the painting was behind protective glass and was not harmed. But this all highlights a difficulty with paintings: they can only be one place at a time. The Mona Lisa can be in the Louvre or the Met or Napoleon’s bedroom but not all three places at once. And moving a work of art from place to place is expensive and risky and anxiety-inducing. All of that is true for any physical work of art but it gets multiplied if the art is well-known. Downloadable art can move almost anywhere in the world safely in just a few seconds. In the unlikely event of corruption or disruption during downloading, a collector can just download the art again. No expense, no risk, no problem.
The previous two factors help make downloadable art accessible to more art lovers. Original oil-on-canvas paintings range from hundreds to thousands of dollars on Etsy and from thousands to millions of dollars at Sotheby’s. We don’t have a problem with that. At Kling Collective, we deeply appreciate the contributions of artists and want all artists to be fairly compensated for their time and talent, at the very least. Beyond that, we support any artist pricing their work however they wish. We also support well-heeled art collectors paying as much as they wish for anything from Salvator Mundi to a Bored Ape NFT. But most people can’t collect art that way. Kling Collective is proud to have downloadable art available and accessible to a wide range of art lovers and collectors.
But my favorite thing about downloadable art isn’t the convenience of sharing it. I think the most novel innovation of downloadable art is that it allows one piece of art to be enjoyed several different ways and encourages effectively infinite further explorations of any work. It catalyzes and inspires new ways of thinking about art by blending creation, transmission, and display into a spectrum of artistic experience that defies or outright denies sharp delineation. As just one example from our collection of works, consider Chanae Kling’s acrylic on canvas painting Through the Midday Trees. She painted this work with a palette knife on a piece of canvas sixteen inches wide and nine inches tall. Sixteen by nine. 16:9. This painting was conceived and hand-painted for display on high definition and ultra high definition televisions (like Samsung Frame TVs). That alone is unique. Artists have been spreading paint on canvas with palette knives for hundreds of years but they were painting that canvas for people to look at. This work was painted knowing that no one would ever lay eyes on the physical canvas. It was acrylic on canvas for binary. It was subsequently scanned at stunningly high resolution and can be printed or displayed 8-16 times larger than its original size with no loss of quality but instead an intriguing amplification of each palette stroke. When the art scan was being prepared for compression and download, we realized that each tree in the painting could stand alone as its own work if desired so we made that option available. When you download the files for Through the Midday Trees, you’ll have the ability to display it on a 16:9 television (including a Frame TV, of course) or print it at almost any size or any dimension plus two perfectly square files to display as a diptych. If you love art, that’s exciting. Downloadable art grants art lovers a new ability to participate in and evolve the creative process that was begun by the artist. You can display the same piece one way in your living room and a completely different way in your office. You can shape the art so it fits your personality and your space in a way that is expressive, nondestructive, and that leaves the door forever open to new and different interpretations.
That’s what’s so great about downloadable art.