Abstract
The paper addresses the issue of digitalization of the contemporary art market. It analyzes key features of today’s online art market and discusses three technological innovations—cryptocurrency, blockchain, and artificial intelligence—that have the potential to contribute to the further development and growth of online art trade. The paper demonstrates that whereas cyberspace attracts new talent and great business ideas intended to make global art commerce more versatile and efficient, online art market players alongside with providers of the online art market data and analytics offer interesting avenues of future research in this sector.
Highlights
Academic research on art markets heavily depends on surviving guild records, inventory studies, financial statements, and legal documents (McNulty 2014)
As the art market scholars of the DALMI (Duke Art, Law & Markets Initiative) research consortium Van Miegroet, Alexander, and Leunissen suggest in their paper Imperfect Data, Art Markets and Internet Research, published in this special issue, “it is hard to predict the future of online art markets, though it is obvious that over the past ten years online market platforms have been gaining in importance”
It has analyzed the composition and the functional orientation of the online segment of the contemporary art market and has revealed three most salient cyber phenomena that can potentially exert an enormous influence on the further development of the global online art trade
Summary
Academic research on art markets heavily depends on surviving guild records, inventory studies, financial statements, and legal documents (McNulty 2014). As the art market scholars of the DALMI (Duke Art, Law & Markets Initiative) research consortium Van Miegroet, Alexander, and Leunissen suggest in their paper Imperfect Data, Art Markets and Internet Research, published in this special issue, “it is hard to predict the future of online art markets, though it is obvious that over the past ten years online market platforms have been gaining in importance”. We argue that the Internet has turned from an art-marketing instrument to an apart-standing art market segment with its unique features and development patterns. To support this argument, we first analyze the evolution and the current state of the online art market and examine three particular technologies that have the potential to contribute to the future expansion of the online art trade. Due to the marginal presence of the online art market segment in the overall contemporary art market, we have to anticipate the skepticism about our research on the part of the “conservative” art community that does not recognize the issue of the online art market as worthy of separate analysis
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