Collecting Digital Art | Looking Beyond the Screen
Written by Rebekah Tolley, Producer and Curator of Spotlight: Digitalism
There is a question I hear often: Can you actually collect digital art?
The answer is simple. Yes. And collectors already are.
The more interesting question now is not whether digital art belongs in a collection, but which artists and which works are worth collecting. That shift matters. Digital art is no longer a speculative category waiting for the traditional art world to decide whether it has a place. It has developed a history, an international artist community, dedicated galleries and platforms, museum collections, specialist departments at major auction houses…and, increasingly, serious collectors.
The technology may be different, however, the principles of collecting are remarkably familiar.
The market has already moved
The evidence is increasingly difficult to ignore.
The 2025 Art Basel & UBS Survey of Global Collecting, which surveyed 3,100 high-net-worth collectors across ten major markets, found that 51% had purchased digital art during 2024 or 2025. Digital art ranked third among media by total collector spending, behind painting and sculpture, while the average proportion of digital works within collections rose from 3% in 2024 to 13% in 2025.
That is not niche behaviour.
Major institutions and auction houses have responded accordingly. Christie's has a dedicated Digital Art department, while Art Basel's Zero 10 presentation in 2026 placed digital art within one of the world's most influential contemporary art fairs.
The question is no longer: Is digital art collectible? It is: What makes a digital artwork worth collecting?
Start with the art
The answer begins exactly where it does with any other artwork. Look at the work.
Digital art encompasses moving image, generative systems, digital photography, AI, augmented and virtual reality, interactive works, software, sound, digital sculpture and practices combining digital and physical elements.
The technology may be integral to the work, but it should never substitute for the work itself. A technically impressive piece can be artistically slight. Something apparently simple can contain an extraordinary idea.
The useful question isn't simply what technology has been used?
It is: Why does this artist need this technology? When the technology becomes integral to the idea, it stops being novelty and becomes part of the artist's language.
What exactly are you collecting?
This is where digital art requires a slightly different conversation.
With a painting, the object is generally clear. A digital artwork might be a video, fixed image, generative system, interactive environment, software, installation - or several of these simultaneously.
So, understand what constitutes the work.
Is it a specific file or limited edition? Does it include equipment? Are there installation instructions? What rights accompany it? What happens if the software or hardware becomes obsolete?
These aren't reasons to be wary. They are part of understanding what you are acquiring and, increasingly, part of its provenance.
A much longer history
Digital art is still sometimes discussed as though it arrived with NFTs or AI.
In reality, its history stretches back around 70 years: from experiments with computers as creative instruments in the 1950s, through algorithmic art, cybernetics and electronic music; digital imaging and computer-controlled environments; multimedia, CD-ROM and net art; and onwards through increasingly networked and immersive forms, blockchain, AR, VR and AI.
Across that history, artists have repeatedly challenged familiar ideas about authorship, participation, originality and what an artwork can actually be.
The tools have changed beyond recognition.
The questions have proved remarkably durable.
Don't buy the technology. Buy the artist.
This may be the most important principle for anyone entering the field.
Technology moves incredibly quickly.
Artists' ideas can have much longer lives.
Today's revolutionary software may be forgotten in five years. A genuinely original artistic proposition can remain relevant for decades.
Look beyond the individual work. Is there a sustained practice? Is the artist developing, experimenting and taking risks? Does the work make sense within their wider trajectory? And would it still interest you if the technology were no longer fashionable?
The strongest digital artists rarely simply demonstrate what the latest technology can do. They use it to explore something that could not be explored in quite the same way otherwise.
AI, NFTs and the art
Artificial intelligence has brought digital art unprecedented attention, but it belongs to a much longer conversation around machines, creativity and authorship.
Where does authorship sit? How much agency belongs to the artist? Is the artwork the prompt, process, selection, resulting image, system…or the relationship between them?
The interesting artists aren't simply producing impressive images with a fashionable tool. They are doing something meaningful with those questions.
The same distinction matters with NFTs. NFTs introduced mechanisms for recording ownership and provenance and brought an enormous new audience into digital collecting.
But an NFT is not automatically an artwork.
Technological scarcity does not automatically create artistic significance.
Artist, quality, provenance, edition, cultural relevance and long-term significance still matter.
Again, the technology isn't the point. The thinking is.
Living with digital art
One pleasure of collecting digital art is the fluid relationship between artwork and space. A work may occupy a wall like a painting, change over time, respond to movement, generate a different image with every encounter, exist quietly on a screen or consume an entire room.
So ask practical questions too. Where will it live? What equipment does it require? How should it be displayed? Does it require sound, darkness or interaction?
These considerations are no stranger than thinking about scale, framing, light or conservation when buying physical work.
Digital belongs in the collection
There is no reason digital art should occupy a separate category.
A generative artwork can sit alongside a painting. Moving image can converse with photography. Digital and physical sculpture can occupy the same space.
Contemporary art has always expanded its media. Photography changed painting. Film introduced time. Video transformed moving image in the gallery. Installation changed the relationship between artwork and space.
Digital art continues that process.
This is why Spotlight: Digitalism at British Art Fair matters to me. As Producer and Curator, I want digital practice to be encountered not as a technological novelty or specialist annex, but within the wider conversation of contemporary art and collecting.
The artists aren't waiting for the art world to catch up. They are already making the work.
Collectors are already buying it. Museums are already preserving it. The market has already moved.
So what should you collect?
The work that stops you. The work you return to. The artist whose practice you want to follow. The piece that makes you see something differently.
Understand the technology, certainly, but look harder at the thinking behind it.
Because digital art doesn't require a new definition of what it means to collect.
It asks us to recognise that the artwork itself has changed. The screen is simply where you might encounter it.
The art is what matters.