Which Is Worth More - Paint On a Canvas Or Pixels On Paper?

I enjoy both painting with acrylics on canvas and creating digital art with pixels. Everyone knows what "paintings" are but the question is what should we call digital art creations? Digital paintings? Digital art? Digital graphics? I call mine "Digital airbushing" since the painting process is similar - I create "friskets" of masked areas on each screen layer and then fill in each with color to create mass, shadows, highlights, etc. But I'm having second thoughts about what to call my work.

 

I recently attended a gallery opening for a young artist who moved a lot of paint around on big canvases. I mean A LOT of paint. I think he used his hands to apply the paint rather than brushes or knives. It was acrylic paint right out of the jar - primary colors with hardly any mixing whatsoever. Nothing against the technique but what his work lacked was artistic talent. There was nothing under the paint to appreciate. Perspective was bad, composition was wrong, subject matter was unimaginative and titles were vague like "A tree" which were not very thought provoking. One painting had rubberized acrylic paint drips running off the canvas like candle wax. He said it was his "signature" and that he had been invited by UCLA art professors to lecture on his technique. I've been around some pretty whacked out characters in the art world to know there is a wide range of skill levels and tastes in art but I didn't get this guy's work at all.

 

Throughout the evening "SOLD" stickies kept popping up on his $2,000-$5,000 paintings. My opinion obviously wasn't shared by the crowd and his work sold like hot cakes. Why? I think it was the paint. It had texture, shape, dimension, and feeling (a bad feeling in my estimation, but at least the work wasn't boring).

 

After that experience, I'm considering changing the name of my digital "airbrushing" to digital "paintings" in the hopes I might sell them to an unsuspecting art crowd.