Is Art Basel planning to invade the online sales’ territories?

A few days ago MCH group, the 100-year-old international live marketing company owning Art Basel, officially announced the acquisition of curiator.com, a small web platform launched in April 2014 that has been designed to help the “art enthusiast to collect and discover art on-line”. Developed by Tobias Boonstoppel, who was a software engineer at Google, and Moenen Erbuer, who worked at AKQA, Curiator – still in its Beta version – is basically a social network allowing you to create your virtual collection of artworks’ images and share them with the other users. Differently from Pinterest and other leading digital art platforms such as Artstack or Artsy, images are uploaded on Curiator directly by its users, who are asked to take pictures of the pieces they like and of their captions. According to its developers roughly 100.000 images of artworks are already available on Curiator, and this number is expected to grow fast in the short period, also thanks to the empowering new partnership with MCH.

 

Curiator will continue to operate as a stand-alone platform, but as Tobias Boonstoppel explains through MCH’s press release: “the projects we are working on are important regarding the MCH’s overall strategic directions of internationalization and digitalization”. Even if Art Basel is not directly involved at the moment, this move could be regarded as a first direct step toward the most rapid growing sector of the art market, that of the on-line sales. According to the TEFAF Global Art Market Report, sales of art online were estimated conservatively to have reached $4.7 billion in 2015, that already represents the 7% of global art and antiques sales by value. And, what counts more, 58% of the art dealers think that online sales will increase over the next five years.

 

In fact, some of you may have noticed that even a quite reserved art dealer such as Karsten Greve recently opened his gallery’s Instagram page and, on the other hand, also a gallery focused on cutting hedge young artists such as Supportico Lopez recently launched on their web site “Bottega“, a new section dedicated to online sale of their artists’ special editions of artworks.

 

Therefore, if you were sceptical about the occasional optimism showed by the main auction houses after the sessions occurred during the Brexit week, and if you were among those who got surprised by the recent aggressive communication campaign promoted by UBS (main sponsor of Art Basel) and Artsy (that is partner of many art fairs around the world including Art Basel), now you may have another element in support of the idea that someone quite soon will be able to challenge the auction houses’ extraordinary marketing power – which apparently is still not based on technology, but on knowledge and information: as a matter of fact it would be easier for a big fish such as Art Basel to compete with auction houses for their business than vice versa.

 

No official statement has been made so far by MCH, Art Basel, or its director Marc Spiegler in this regard, and at the moment curiator.com is not selling art. But as clearly proved by those who went online with a similar approach, selling art would be likely the only way to make it a profitable company and a new generation of fully digitalized collectors (and dealers) will soon come to the market, as Rene Kamm himself, CEO of MCH Group, also seems to expect. “It is fantastic – he stated – to have two very well-connected and experienced digital experts joining our team, to support us in our continuing efforts to be a prominent digital player – especially in the arts sector”. Has a new phase of the art market just begun?

November 25, 2020