Digital BW, The Print

I've had some interesting conversations about editions and gallery 
rules.

Regarding Existing Work.
Was talking with a curator at the Getty once about Edward Weston's 
work.  How many Pepper #30's are there?  There are # of known prints 
and I immediately threw out 3x that number as a reasonable possible 
number of images that could come to light in the next 50 years.

A parallel.  Collectors of 35mm cameras can still find amazing things 
because the first generation of buyers can still be in possession of 
them.  It seems reasonable that many things pass through two hands, 
if not two generations, before they come to the light of a 
museum/collector.

Regarding Editions.
How many is enough?  Unless you sell work, an edition is 
meaningless.  An edition is meaningless if it isn't fully produced.  
An edition is meaningless if it keeps your work so rare that people 
can't see it, now, or 200 years from now.  Vermeer might be the 
exception but it took several hundred years to grab the populations 
interest at large.

Seems a lot of early 20th Century art, I'm thinking German 
Expressionists in particular, had editions upwards of 100.  Enough 
for people to see them in a number of museums around the world.  
Enough so they get published.  Still not enough to have saturated 
collections around the world.

Regarding Descriptions of artwork.
This is an outgrowth of curatorial work.  The need to describe 
something in words so it can be recognized when pulled out of the box 
(& match the accession#).  Computer assisted art, printed through 
inkjet printers is not a lot different than woodblock, etching, 
lithography, or photography.  All of these processes were new at the 
time, many were UTILIZED by artists for traits they showed to 
advantage.  This, sometime after the commercial world had it long 
enough for artists to get access to.

Cleavis in AZ