FOR his fall show the artist Tom Friedman planted two dozen characteristically demented sculptures throughout the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. He set a giant Excedrin box, made from dozens of cut-up Excedrin boxes, on the floor near the entrance. He placed three identically crumpled wads of paper on a shelf. And he affixed to the ceiling a bunch of colorful papier-mâché balloons, which magically appeared to float despite their weight. Their strings were held together not by a hand but by a pair of men’s briefs suspended in midair.

It was Mr. Friedman’s first outing with Gagosian after years of showing at the much humbler Feature Gallery in New York, and the exhibition sold out, with works priced up to $500,000. But most of the buyers did not see the installation. They did not personally see the pieces at all. Gagosian sold out the show before it opened, in large part through a flurry of e-mail messages and digital images.

When asked at the opening if the show had really sold out in three days, Deborah McLeod, the gallery’s director, replied, “More like three minutes.”

It’s another sign of the acceleration of the contemporary art market: New works, even in the six-figure range, are selling by digital image alone. For the Friedman show, Gagosian set up a private section on its Web site, accessible only by a password sent via e-mail message to select collectors. More typically, gallery directors send off e-mail messages with JPEGs — a format for digitally storing and transmitting images — to potential clients.