How to buy a Damien Hirst for £7.50
Online venture s[edition] will sell limited edition digital works by contemporary artists
By Charlotte Burns. Web only
Published online: 17 November 2011
LONDON. Artists including Damien Hirst, Isaac Julien, Shepard Fairey and Wim Wenders have created limited edition digital works for a web platform, s[edition], that launches today in London.
The works are available to buy and download for display on mobile phones, iPads and computers. Each edition is numbered and authenticated with a certificate signed by the artist. Prices range from £5 to £500, and will increase as editions sell out, rising to around £1,000 according to Harry Blain, the site’s chairman and cofounder.
Blain, formerly the director of London’s Haunch of Venison gallery and now co-director of the Blain|Southern and Blain|Di Donna galleries, is leading the venture with Robert Norton, the former chief executive of Saatchi Online and head of e-commerce at AOL Europe. “It’s an idea I’ve been playing around with since the early 1990s when we were looking at CDs, but the technology was simply not there then,” says Blain. He calls the concept a “21st-century adaptation of woodcuts and etchings. Artists are just using the media available to them to reach a larger audience”.
