Loop Barcelona

Loop is a case apart in the Spanish calendar: the only fair given over entirely to video art, and with it the only occasion to face a question that comes up nowhere else — what exactly do you buy when the work is not an object?

First of all: this is not what the directory sells

Better said plainly. None of the houses in this directory works in video art today. Loop is here because the trade’s fair calendar is published whole or not at all, not because we have anything to offer in this category.

If you have come looking for where to buy video art in Spain, the organiser’s website will serve you better than we will. What we can add is what follows: how a purchase works when there is no object.

What is acquired

Buying a video means acquiring four things at once, and confusing them is where all the trouble comes from:

One example of an edition. As with prints: the video is editioned, say in five examples plus two artist’s proofs. Buying 2/5 does not give you exclusivity, it gives you a place in a short edition.

A carrier. A disc, a server, sometimes an installation with its projector and its specifications. It is the part that ages.

A certificate. It is the document that genuinely evidences ownership, more than the carrier does. If the disc is lost, it is replaced; if the certificate is lost, the work is lost.

A set of exhibition conditions. Size, room, sound, whether it loops or has a beginning and an end. They are part of the work: showing it another way may infringe the author’s moral rights.

What is not bought is the copyright. The artist keeps it, exactly as a painter keeps it over the image of their painting.

The two clauses to insist on

Format migration. It is the central problem of the category: the file that plays effortlessly today may not open in twenty years. The usual arrangement is that artist or gallery undertakes to supply the file in new formats when needed. Without that clause in writing, what you buy has a technical expiry date, and that is the difference between a work and a file.

What may and may not be done with it. Whether it can be lent to an institution, whether it can be shown outside the stated conditions, whether a backup copy may be made. All of it is negotiable before paying and non-negotiable after.

And a warning about resale

Video art is the hardest category in the whole market to get out of. It is bought mainly for institutional collections and by collectors who have no intention of reselling. There is almost no secondary market, and anyone going in expecting to leave when they choose will find out late.

It is exactly the sort of thing this site would rather say before the purchase than after. How provenance is read and what to demand in writing is in the pact and in the guides.

Loop is the most specialised of the four fairs of the Spanish autumn. Where it sits against the other three is set out in four fairs in nine weeks.