Is there a market for digital art? Are there digital art collectors or buyers?
I am going to tell the following story to clarify my viewpoint about the market for digital artworks.

Story of the Posters & the Possessing… No one around here wants it

I have the habit of printing some of the digital artworks I like and having them framed to hang on my walls. About a month ago a famous local traditional artist and former professor of mine visited me to see some of the architectural designs that I had done. While in my home he looked around at the digital images hanging on my walls and said, “Nice posters.”

"No, they are not posters they are artworks, digital artworks," I said.

He smiled and simply pointed to a traditional artwork on my wall that was painted by another local artist:

“That’s an artwork, those are posters.” He continued, “just tell me how many copies exactly like these digital artworks you could do and tell me how would you than know which one is the original one. On the other hand, no one has another copy like this oil painting. It’s unique.”

I responded, “The number of copies does not affect the value of the art.”

He sat down on the chair surrounded by all that smoke emitting from his cigar “At the corner of the street there is a shop that has a painting of the Mona Lisa, would you pay the same price for this fake copy as the original one?”

I tried to explain that these digital artworks hanging on my walls were done in the same context as any traditional artwork. Just the difference is that the tools used are the computer software, besides that most of them were not painted for a specific purpose other than these artists did them for their own pleasure.

“Ok, I am not discussing if they have artistic expressions or not, because they have, and you can use any tool you want to produce your own art. I will ask you a question; could those images be sold for a price higher than the price of their paper and their frame? And what is the name of the most famous digital artists in the world?”

He kept talking, “Would any of the international art institutions such as museums, Christie's, and Sotheby's care about digital art? The answer still no. Simply because they can't adopt digital art as a viable article of trade. The buyers aren't interested in digital art; they consider it as an ‘artificial’ art”

“The digital art is a relatively new art and in the future the images are going to change. However, like any type of art it has to be formed first and the market will come later,” I replied.

“Art sellers around the world feel they do not need a virtual digital image or concept to sell, it’s about the money not just the art,” he smiled as he thought that he was scored a knockdown.

He took the architectural designs “I like those photorealistic architectural renderings but it would take us a while to make them real, is not that right!” he laughed.

“Yea, but they are now the most vital thing you’ll count on to make the building real, not photorealistic.”
He left and left behind him a big cloud of smoke that reminded me of those days when we were students at the university and we could recognize the smell of his cigar from 100m away.

He was not talking about art itself; he was talking about the fantasy of possessing art. Maybe there are some psychological issues that interfere with the idea of possessing a masterpiece that no one else has it.

Another conversation with a friend of mine who works in a digital equipment store answered my questions in different way:
“Yea, the digital art market is great, just take a look at the market for scanners, printers, large format printers, ink, high-quality art paper, LCDs…the sales of all of these products are flourishing year after year.”He was not talking about the art itself; he was talking about the flourishing of production tools used to make digital advertisements or digital photos.