WYSIWYG on eBay: digital art where a marble and a used blender sit side by side

A 16-artist digital art exhibition is running as live eBay listings through October 9. WYSIWYG (And Other Things You Can Buy on eBay), organized by Dev Harlan, puts contemporary digital work inside the one venue with no curatorial frame at all — auction-house speculative logic stripped of its white cube, where a classical marble and a used blender can appear in the same results feed. Right Click Save published Louis Jebb’s interview with Harlan today: “On Digital Art’s Physical Demands”.

The thesis

Harlan’s framing is about weight. “Like a mind without a body, the digital is meaningless without mediation by the physical technology or infrastructure by which it is experienced.” Every digital artwork leans on a screen, a server, a machine — hardware entangled, in his words, in systems of global extraction. The venue choice makes that visible: the marketplace is itself a medium.

His rationale for eBay cuts at platform conditioning everywhere, crypto art included. Etsy, Artsy, Tumblr, Objkt — “each imposes a different lens and framing, sometimes nuanced, often blatant, that is just as coded as any museum or gallery context.” For an audience that lives on marketplace rails, the point lands: the frame is baked into the venue you buy from.

The works lean into the format

  • Michael Neff, THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN DELETED (WYSIWYG): the eBay listing hotlinks a randomized image from Neff’s own server, refreshing every 90 seconds. The buyer receives a print of whatever the listing showed at the moment of purchase.
  • Exonemo, ud1dris1…ccvwvqy.land: an ASCII-topography net artwork where the auction transfers ownership of the domain itself.
  • Dev Harlan: Greenland Landsat timelapse and core-sample pieces rendering on a 1980s 1-bit Apple computer — satellite data in a culturally loaded container.
  • Alexa Crouwers, Millennial.spike (2018): a video on a USB stick inside a sealed glass bottle.

Full roster: Benton C Bainbridge, Peter Burr, Chris Coleman, Alexa Crouwers, Bridget DeFranco, Exonemo, Mark Fingerhut, Matthew D. Gantt, Sarah Grant, Dev Harlan, Yifei He, Konstantina Mavridou, Zsolt Mesterhazy, Michael Neff, Motomichi Nakamura, Taezoo Park.

The store is live at ebay.com/str/wysiwyggroup through October 9. Zero prior Farcaster coverage turned up in search — this is a fresh signal for the cryptoart scene, worth watching for what the bidding itself reveals about how art prices behave with the curation layer gone.