Natalie Bookchin on Tue, 11 Jan 2000 00:17:13 +0100 (CET)


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<nettime> Art discovers the Internet (!!?????)


01/10/00- Updated 12:32 AM ET

Art discovers the Internet

By Maria Puente, USA TODAY

The Internet, once the preserve of techies and other Philistines, has been
invaded by the highbrow crowd. Enough with the flea-market stuff on eBay --
bring on the Monets.

The thinking goes like this: If they can sell Pez dispensers on the Web,
why not Picassos?

Just in the past year, a dizzying array of art Web sites has appeared,
selling everything from mass-produced posters ($50 framed) to "emerging"
artists ($500) to high-ticket Old Masters ($50,000 and up). Some sites sell
directly to consumers; others are online auctions run by the most hallowed
names in the art market.

Intimidated by the haughty ways of art galleries and dealers? Got the cash
but not the confidence or know-how? Go online and find what you want,
whether it's a rare Rembrandt or something blue to match your new sofa.

But are art lovers -- even rich ones -- ready to pay, say, $125,000 for a
painting on Sothebys.com? Would you be willing to write an $11,000 check
for a sculpture on eBay.com?

Sotheby's, eBay and the rest of the art world -- galleries, dealers,
auction houses and artists themselves -- are betting that you are and you
will. After all, people once hooted at the thought of selling books online.
No one is scoffing now, not after a holiday season when consumers embraced
online shopping.

"This is the most revolutionary change that's ever taken place in the art
market," Sotheby's President Diana Brooks says. The company's new Web site,
Sothebys.com, will begin taking bids Tuesday.

The Web is turning the snooty art world into something approximating a real
"art democracy" -- accessible to anyone with a credit card and a smidgen of
cyber-savvy.

"They're trying to make contemporary art less mysterious, less elitist,
more available to people who normally would not be able to see it," says
William Bartman, executive director of Art Resources Transfer, a non-profit
gallery in New York.

Even more important, the Internet is almost certain to greatly expand the
number of artists, consumers and the market itself. In 1992, the Census put
sales of 4,500 retail art dealers at a little more than $2 billion a year.
Today, experts say that there are about 6,000 dealers selling $8 billion to
$15 billion a year worldwide. In the future, thanks to the Net, they say
the possibilities are endless.

It's difficult to say how many of those sales are already taking place on
the Net because sites rarely disclose buyers and sellers. So far, the
highest known price paid on the Web is $168,000 for a watercolor by Italian
artist Lucio Fontana, sold on Artnet.com last year. Web watchers say it's
rumored that millions have been paid for other works, but no one has come
forth to confirm those figures.

"We might be seeing a new species of collector," says Uta Scharf, vice
president of auctions for Artnet.com, putting to rest the conventional
wisdom that art buyers must first see and touch the goods. "The more they
look and compare (on the Net), the more voracious they are. It seems to
totally offset the need for a physical relationship with a picture."

For decades, art lovers have been buying via catalogs or bidding by phone
at live auctions. It's only a small step from that to buying on the Net.
Sites say they guarantee authenticity, condition and provenance (origin and
owner history); unhappy buyers can get their money back.

That helps reassure experienced art buyers about online art shopping.
Richard Segal, 46, a collector in Rye, N.Y., turned to the Web recently to
buy a George Segal (no relation) wall sculpture for $26,250 and a
watercolor by Hilo Chen for under $2,000, which he considers good prices.

At a gallery, it can take hours to look at a few paintings while dealers
try to get you to buy. "If you're not interested, it's much nicer to just
click to the next (painting)," Segal says.

Some in the art world remain skeptical of the Internet. Other dealers have
been driven online by fear: They only dimly understand the Net, but they're
creating their own Web sites or hooking up with portal sites to have a
presence in cyberspace.

Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, a gallery in New York's Soho, established a Web
site to introduce potential buyers to the "difficult" avant-garde art it
sells and to promote the works on display in the gallery. "It's a very
strong complement, and we expect the audience to grow," owner Feldman says.

Many dealers are zooming into cyberspace drawn by the dollar signs. The
eye-popping success of sites such as Amazon.com (11 million customers) and
eBay (2.3 million items for sale, 1.4 billion page views per month) has
demonstrated how easy it is to reach millions of potential new customers.

Says David Udow, marketing executive at ArtStar.com: "A typical gallery has
about 2,000 clients total; through the Internet, 2,000 people a day are
coming to our Web site."

The relatively low cost of going online is more than covered by savings in
the overhead expenses of art dealing, such as catalogs.

"The fact you can send color images at almost no cost around the world is a
godsend to the art industry," says Artnet.com founder Hans Neuendorf, who
says dealers can reduce their overhead from 85% of the total to only 10% by
going online.

"This is not incremental change, it's a sea change," he says. "(I predict)
most of the art trade will move to the Internet eventually."

The early birds have already discovered this. When Pierrette Van Cleve
opened her art consulting business in San Diego in 1987, about 85% of her
sales were in the USA. She went online in 1994; now international sales are
about 50% of her business.

"In 1988, my phone bills were a couple thousand bucks a month; now they're
a couple hundred bucks, and I'm doing three to four times more business,"
says Van Cleve, president of Art Cellar Exchange (artcellarexchange.com).

Sotheby's, the 255-year-old auction house, is plunging deep into the brave
new Web world. The publicly traded firm is spending $40 million, about half
its annual earnings, on two auction Web sites: Sothebys.Amazon.com, a
partnership which launched in November, offers art, antiques, jewelry,
books, collectibles, silver and memorabilia for $100 to about $10,000.
Sothebys.com will offer higher-priced items. "Eventually we're going to see
million-dollar pictures trading online. I'm sure of it," Brooks says.

Still, Sotheby's arrives months or years behind other sites -- a lifetime
in cyberspace. "They're late," says Net vet Van Cleve. "They're doing it
because they can't avoid it."

But Sotheby's has plenty of the big C -- credibility, the crucial commodity
in the art business. As a result, Sotheby's signed up more than 4,600
galleries to sell exclusively on its sites. By contrast, chief rival
Christie's in November abandoned plans to launch a separate online site, in
part because of Sotheby's' head start.

Meanwhile, online-auction pioneer eBay is trying to go upscale. Last
spring, the San Jose-based company bought San Francisco auction house
Butterfield & Butterfield. In October, it began hosting auctions of fine
art on its "Great Collections" section. The highest-priced item sold thus
far is a painting by 19th century artist Gustav Klimt, knocked down for a
little more than $11,000.

But many people, maybe even most, aren't in search of an original Klimt.
What they want is a reproduction, or maybe even the next Klimt. That's
where other sections of the Web market come in. Sites such as art.com and
IncredibleArt.com offer tens of thousands of posters and prints, plus a few
original works.

"It was the ease that appealed to me," says Atlanta accountant Matt Godwin,
who surfed to art.com at the urging of his girlfriend. In five minutes, he
found a print he liked, picked a frame and paid with a credit card. "And
they have a much bigger selection than a framing store."

Other sites specialize in selling original works by "underexposed" artists,
those who are unknown or not represented by galleries or dealers. "We have
artists who needed to have a day job to support their (art) and now they
can focus totally on their art," says Abby Adlerman, president of
Visualize.com, which targets affluent people ages 25-40 willing to spend
$350 on an original work of art.



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