For a long time, the art market was “a secret world of whispers” according to art advisor Kim Heirston, who started her career working in New York’s downtown galleries three decades ago.
But today, starting a fine art collection is easier than ever, thanks to the internet, where many players in the art market now operate.
Artsy, founded in 2009, remains the largest marketplace, with an inventory of over 1 million artworks from more than 4,000 galleries, art fairs and institutions , but sites including Artsper and Saatchi Art also offer plenty of options.
So, where might someone start? As a rule of thumb, prints, works on paper, photography and digital art often offer more reasonable price points than painting or sculpture.
After the mega gallery David Zwirner partnered with smaller galleries to launch a series of viewing rooms while the pandemic shuttered galleries and halted their sales, Zwirner’s son, Lucas, turned the project into its own art e-commerce company with Huang and a separate team.
If an artist’s market value happens to rise over the course of the lease period, the cost of the artwork will not go up — though if someone else wishes to purchase the artwork during the lease period, the galleries reserve the right to sell it.
Though some of the works listed on Parlor can reach upwards of $50,000, Siegelmann says they are mostly focused on offering works of art under $20,000.
One of the biggest shifts in the industry has occurred in the digital realm, with the emergence of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.
Merel van Helsdingen, founder and managing director of Amsterdam’s new-media focused Nxt Museum — and a digital art collector herself — says that NFTs have demolished the barriers for who gets to sell their work as an artist.
One of the biggest benefits of artists using NFTs is that they automatically make a percentage of each new sale of their artworks, in contrast to traditional auctions where artists’ works can sell for millions and they don’t see a dime.