The Art Market Is Evolving: Buying Art Online, Newcomers And Blockchain
The art world is an extraordinary and creative sector in continuous evolution. A market that until a few years ago was exclusively limited to collectors and local auction sales, something that was turning around and repeatedly to few market niches. Then technologies and digital breakthroughs completely revolutionised this sector as the entire purchase journey of buying art online. The new technologies have opened up this sector to new categories of consumers, such as millennials and newcomers who have begun to purchase art online both for passion and as a form of new kind of investment.
The idea behind approaching the art world can be intimidating. Talking to a gallery owner, visiting an international art fair or attending an auction sale could be so scary. Furthermore, this may represent a barrier, a kind of discouraging process to all new potential customers and followers against those who are approaching for the first time to the art market.
Those issues have been overcome in the last few decades. Indeed, the rise of new digital channels and art platforms – like the Italian pioneer ecommerce Kooness deeply simplified access to this market, allowing different people to buy art online and consequently making it more appealing to non-experts.
As in many other industries, the introduction of digital channels and the opportunity to purchase art online simply surfing on a digital platform, have considerably shifted consumer behaviours. As a result, the global art world market has expanded in double figures within recent years. According to The Art Market 2019 by Artprice (an art company leader in art information), global art turnover rose to $13.3 billion in 2019. In addition to this, the pandemic situation due to Covid19 has highly contributed towards the digitization of the art world, enhancing the “buy art online” process.
“The art market has gone through a challenging and transformative period since early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic created new and unexpected demands for dealers. Along with the difficulties it presented, the crisis also created a window of opportunity for restructuring and innovation in the sector, as organisations were forced to look at new ways of operating, with procedures of the past becoming untenable and new methods and technologies required in order to survive.” (The Art Market 2021 by Art Basel | UBS report).
Therefore, the massive input of Millennials who are comfortable behind a screen and prefer buying art online on dedicated platforms, contemporary art is also proving to be an alternative investment asset. Related to this, the Blockchain technology is gaining momentum in the art market as well, better known as Crypto-Art.
In the field of artworks, Blockchain technology makes possible to provide a unique art piece with a unique code recording information about the author, the date of creation, description, etc (NFT Token). This new technology has two main advantages. On one side it cut off counterfeiting problems and the consequential loss of its economic value. On the other one, it incentivizes the buying and selling process, as ownership changes can be traced much more easily.