I am the collector mentioned above that acquired Professor Goldberg’s Mementomori. While I agree with you on many points in this post, I must disagree with your statement that “digital art cannot be collected and cannot be owned”. Here are a couple of arguments:

1. As digital works are copied they tend to lose fidelity. Jpegs become overly compressed, people edit files, other files are not copied over. stuff happens. Eventually people want to go back to the source, the server where the original data came from and obtain a fresh copy. The collector of net art as the maintainer of the server, continues to serve as the protector and host for the work of art, much as traditional patrons kept oil paintings sheltered from the elements.

2. The second element of collecting web art is perhaps less obvious. An essential element of my acquisition of Mementomori was the transfer of the ownership of the URL for the web site from the artist over to me. Ownership of web site names is a well worked out framework. There is already significant case law on the topic. You can copy the data. but I own the site. I can sell the site, leave it to my children, put it up for auction, whatever. There is a unique element to this piece of net art and I own it.

Yes, it sometimes does feel that I have purchased a set of the emperor’s new clothes. At other times I do feel that I am helping bring art into the milieu it needs in order to prevail for this century.