Until the past few decades, the art market was a largely analog world, guided by word-of-mouth, reputation, specialized knowledge, and “context.” That traditional structure has kept information in the hands of a tight coterie of power brokers. But new technology has begun to upend that paradigm in recent years through NFT platforms, live-streamed auctions, online sales, and fractionalized assets. AI may prove to be the next step in that shift, as companies enter the market promising to use the technology to sift through historical data and market trends to help experts appraise works more quickly and accurately than ever before.
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Caroline Taylor is one of those experts, having seen firsthand how auction houses and dealers get involved in an artwork’s appraisal process to protect their assets. (Taylor started her career with internships at the Met and Phillips before becoming a curator at Deutsche Bank and then starting a private advisory.)
“Along the way, I became an appraiser and was shocked at how that industry ran,” Taylor told ARTnews. “After a few years, it became very clear there were no neutral appraisers. Every appraisal firm is also a dealer.”
In 2021, Taylor founded Appraisal Bureau as an antidote, promising neutral, technology-driven appraisals. The company has a proprietary software platform, integrated with AI, which functions as a “co-pilot,” enhancing inventory management with continuous, dynamic evaluations. Appraisal Bureau’s neutrality has fostered strong relationships with galleries, according to Taylor, who are more willing to share data with a company not involved in sales. Those relationships mean the company has access to private sales data, which Taylor said helps them provide more accurate valuations than their competitors.
Artory, which records artwork and provenance information on the blockchain, has a similar deftness with leveraging data. “The most important thing is expertise,” Nanne Dekking, the founder of Artory, told ARTnews. “And I say this as the founder of a data and technology company. AI only works if you have the right people looking at the data.”
Artory works in close collaboration with art appraisal firm Winston Art Group, which uses decades of private sales data to fine-tune the appraisal and valuation progress. On top of the data available to them through Winston, Artory has an ever-growing data set of public auction sales, culled from more than 44 million transactions at 4,000 auction houses.
Since it was launched in 2016, Artory has verified, secured on blockchain, and tokenized over $1.5 billion worth of art and collectibles, and secured troves of helpful appraisal data along the way. If Artory’s name sounds unfamiliar, market observers may be more familiar with its data than they realize. Economist Clare McAndrew’s much-followed Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report uses Artory’s data to research her findings.
The success of Artory and Appraisal Bureau is in some respects a recognition that art has become a popular asset class for the ultra-wealthy and, therefore, that the art world has become increasingly integrated with the finance industry, as ARTnews’ Angelica Villa reported last year.
“My main purpose is to help people who own art understand its value, not to help them immediately sell it but to give them, their wealth adviser, or their financial adviser a much more solid idea of the value of that art collection in a language that is understandable in the financial world,” Dekking said.
Unsurprisingly, Jamie LaFleur, the founder of ARTDAI, also has a background on the sales side. He started Banks Gallery in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 2000, and in 2017 he became a private dealer. LaFleur founded ARTDAI at the same time, driven by a simple yet profound need: to scale the expertise required to manage large art collections effectively.
“As a private dealer, I was also a sort of de-facto curator for a number of large collections, and I was really having trouble sort of replicating myself,” LaFleur told ARTnews. “Not only across the collections, but also within each individual collection, some of which had anywhere from 500 to 3,000 works of art.”
Like Artory and Appraisal Bureau, ARTDAI merges human expertise with the efficiency of technology. As LaFleur saw firsthand, managing art collections—whether for collectors, insurers, or financial institutions—requires not just a deep understanding of the art itself but also the ability to handle vast amounts of data. ARTDAI’s mission is to harness AI to provide data-driven insights that complement, rather than replace, the human touch.
ARTDAI’s model is set up to ingest vast amounts of raw, often chaotic market data from various sources, and then apply proprietary algorithms to organize and analyze collections in a way that is meaningful and actionable. The company’s data models, LaFleur said, are not meant to replace human judgment but to enhance it, ensuring that valuations reflect the full complexity of the market.
Despite the promise of Moneyball-ing the art market—which is to say, normalizing artwork valuations for all players—the auction houses don’t seem to be buying it just yet. All three major auction houses declined to comment on their usage of AI for valuations.
It’s likely only a matter of time. ARTDAI, Artory, and Appraisal Bureau are all already working with banks, investment firms, insurance companies, and major collectors. Once one player has an edge, it’s not long before everyone goes after it. (Puck’s Marion Maneker showed off ARTDAI’s prowess in a recent column analyzing macro-trends in the market going back to 2007.) Meanwhile, AI is already showing up in provenance tracking, market forecasting, and fraud detection. Though it seems in each of those cases, as with valuation, companies are pursuing the hybrid approach that combines AI’s analytical power with humans’ nuanced expertise.
This column is part of our latest digital issue, AI and the Art World. Follow along for more stories throughout this week and next.
