Artprice and its 900,000 Members Open a New Standardised Art Marketplace

Artprice and its 900,000 Members Open a New Standardised Art Marketplace PARIS, January 19/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Over the last five years, the art market has lived through the stock-market crash in 2000, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the War in Iraq that began in 2003. The overall impact in terms of the volume of art sales has been dramatic. Whereas 16,000 fine-art sales were catalogued in 2000 worldwide, there were fewer than 10,000 in 2004. Given the economic context, it would have been normal for art prices to fall. This is exactly what happened in 1991, when demand contracted. However, the key art market players - auctioneers, dealers and galleries - having learned from the difficulties they experienced in 1991, have adopted a new approach. This essentially consists of carefully filtering supply by rigorously selecting the works that will go up for sale to prevent a free fall in prices. By tightly controlling the market and only offering for sale works that are sure to find a buyer, the market players are able to maintain prices. Furthermore, as demand has been strong over the last two years, this scarcity in supply has actually spurred prices (+18% in 2004 in the United States) and today, prices are practically back to their 1990 record highs. However, the resulting restricted market equilibrium is not very Pareto efficient. Regulating prices by controlling supply restrains the market artificially and slows down trading among art buyers and sellers. Despite strong demand, countless sellers are still unable to sell their works using traditional channels, even at lower-than-current prices. Today, many art collectors feel excluded from the market and dissatisfied with the lack of liquidity and free movement in the market. The Internet, with players such as Ebay, the world's leader in online auctions, has offered an initial response to the shrinking supply of works in the art market with its revolutionary model. This system works particularly well for markets of homogeneous goods, but it does not fully meet the requirements of the fine-art market. Between the works traded through galleries and auctioneers, and those "hunted for" on Ebay, Artprice is going to offer the art market an alternative to help enhance the liquidity of the art market. On February 9th 2005, Artprice will launch an illustrated Classifieds service (USD 49) - encompassing access to our standardised databases - that will enable its 900,000 members to buy and sell works of art freely and transparently. (copyright (c) www.artprice.com 1987-2004 Thierry Ehrmann) Artprice, the world leader in art market information, lists over 21 million auction prices and indices covering over 306,000 artists collected from 2,900 international auction houses. Artprice daily serves the main financial press titles and agencies with the art market trends. Artprice is listed on the Euronext Paris: Euroclear: 7478 - Bloomberg: PRC - Reuters: ARTF Source: Artprice.com Pierre Capelle, Telephone number: +33-(0)478-220-000, E-mail: pcapelle@artprice.com ------- Profile: International Entertainment