Scott, it almost sounds like your friend isn't accumulating ... maybe stealing :) My kids get all over me for buying my own CDs and ripping mp3s to play on my phone/mp3 player instead of going to the itune store or Amazon and just buying one tune at a time. I would then store these on my computer. But I had a major hardware crash some years back - lost some stuff, forever. I run a redundant RAID system now, and will, forever. And I still have the CDs as additional backups. I guess we could buy artwork as a consumable, but that would really denigrate the artist. A work of art should have a more lasting effect. If it lives only on an electronic display, will it die when the display dies? And must we always have that display available to view it? I disagree some (respectfully) with Brooks. The artwork, in my mind, is both an experience and an artifact, or maybe an experience via an artifact. When I walk past one of my favorite photographs hanging on my wall, or catch it out of the corner of my eye while doing other things, it brings back the original experience/emotion that first attracted me. Experience/artifact; one doesn't exist without the other. Al (Don Quixote) Benas