Big Daata

Last week, as VIPs rushed the booths at the Frieze New York and NADA fairs, the collector and patron Anita Zabludowicz and the curator David Gryn launched a virtual marketplace for art that anyone can view online. Daata Editions, as they’re calling it, may have opted for a physical booth at NADA, but the spirit of the venture is not, in a fashion, just post-Internet; it’s also, as Gryn quipped to New York magazine, post-art fair. The work they are selling—when you buy an edition, you receive a higher quality downloadable file than what is available for viewing on the site—favors artists who are known their fluency in the tropes and tools of the Internet, the likes of Jon Rafman, Ed Fornieles, and the Belgium-based collective Leo Gabin. There’s also, for example, a video series by the Canadian artist Chloe Wise, who has always had a knack for taking the piss out of the fashion and art worlds. Her six-part series is based on overheard snatches of dialogue during the annual extravaganza that is Art Basel Miami Beach—it’s titled, Do You Really Think He Fingered Her: Miami. As narration over scenes in which an actress plays a version of Wise’s wink-wink bad-girl social media persona, the snippets read as wry (and at times sad) found poetry. “A lot of the artists that are part of Daata have a sense of humor that really comes through,” says Wise. “And I think a lot of them engage with audiences in a way that’s fluid across platforms. As a digital native, I’ve always had these disparate but united personas—the public, the private, the publicly private. I just wanted to express how much fluff we put out into this rolling, scrolling river of words and images.”