SketchUp Abstract Art Prints
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Fred Bartels is testing the waters to see if there is a market for his abstract art prints made using SketchUp. His storefront is here.
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I was nosing around Warehouse last week and came across his work. Very impressive and quite unique. I love art and he has some great works in there. I wonder though, what would prevent someone from downloading his models and saving and printing their own copy? Obviously morals, but who on Warehouse has morals?
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/ ... 42c246688a
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I can't help but wonder what Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno would have thought of digital art like Mr. Bartels'...who needs mechanical reproduction anymore when every copy is in fact an exact duplicate of the original?
poster-Lewis Wadsworth
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Jim,
Thanks for the shout out.
A couple of responses to the other posts.
I'm very consciously trying to produce art with SketchUp. I'll leave it to others to decide if I'm succeeding. (Personally, some days I think I'm getting somewhere, other days I think it's all pretty lame.)
For some reason SketchUp is a medium which I find compelling. I think it has to do with the intuitive and fluid nature of the interface. I've been playing with the program since soon after it was released, however the 3D-Warehouse has been an incredibly motivating factor for the development of my work, both as a source to learn from other models and as a source for feedback about my models. (For instance, Jim Foltz's models almost always get me thinking in new directions.)
I believe the ideal presentation medium for SketchUp art is a computer screen running a high-resolution walkthough movie. I produce 1024 x 680 walkthroughs of most of my models and display these on a 24" Apple cinema display at my school using a custom FileMaker kiosk-mode solution that randomly picks the movies. Most of us are not yet at the point where we can dedicate large flat-screen monitors - and the computers to drive them - to the display of artwork. However, given Moore's Law forces it seems possible that eventually many people will do this.
Since the ideal display medium is a few years away I thought I'd explore the idea of selling prints of models. Yes, anyone can download the models from the SketchUp warehouse and make their own prints, but few people have printers that will produce high-quality 24" x 36" prints. This past winter I downloaded a free copy of Kropotkin's "The Great French Revolution" from Google Books and after all the hassle of printing it (I just couldn't read it on the screen) I decided I'd never do that again. The cost of buying the book is much less than the cost of the time and effort of printing it myself. So, I have a little hope that a few people will opt for the simplicity of buying the prints.
Regards,
Fred
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Modelhead,
Thanks for the positive feedback. It always helps!
There are a bunch of issues around selling images of SketchUp models. Some of these are technical, like finding a good way to print models, but most have to do with the nature of art itself and the market for art. At the inexpensive end of this practice of hanging images on walls, there is the poster market. People purchasing posters don't really care that a poster is mass produced. Low price is crucial. At the expensive end of the art market exclusivity is key and price doesn't seem to be much of a factor. In the middle -primarily lithographs and the like- scarcity is artificially created by the artist destroying the plates after a certain quantity of numbered prints are produced. I think something similar will be necessary for SketchUp art (digital art in general) if we want to sell our work outside the poster market. One interesting possibility is to sell a certain number of unique (numbered) views into a model and then destroy the model. The same practice could apply to walkthroughs of models.
I'd love to hear what others have to think about this issue.
Fred
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