"ArtRank gives art the stock market treatment."
Read the whole story by Anna Altman at Bloomberg Businessweek
]]>"Largely hidden from public view, an ecosystem of service providers has blossomed as Wall Street-style investors and other new buyers have entered the market. These service companies, profiting on the heavy volume of deals while helping more deals take place, include not only art handlers and advisers but also tech start-ups like ArtRank. A sort of Jim Cramer for the fine arts, ArtRank uses an algorithm to place emerging artists into buckets including “buy now,” “sell now” and “liquidate.”"
Read the whole story by Will Alden in The New York Times
]]>"Even biennales, supposedly non-commercial, are now part of the international market system. The internet, as it always does, changes everything by widening access almost infinitely. The benefits of this need no explanation; less happy is the development of sites such as ArtRank, in which artists are brutally listed under headings that include “buy now”, “sell now” and “liquidate” if their stock is considered to have peaked. Not much room for aesthetic values there."
Read the whole story by Jan Dalley at The Financial Times
]]>"For $3,500 a quarter, ArtRank's clients get snappy – some might say brutal – investment advice based on information such as past sales, studio output, upcoming shows and posts on Instagram and Twitter. The service, which he says uses complex algorithms developed for investment banking, is limited to 10 subscribers at a time; when Rivera threw the list open in April, there were, he says, more than 80 applications."
Read the whole story by Edward Helmore at The Guardian
]]>"At the request of The Times, Tutela Capital and Beautiful Asset Advisors, a New York company best known for its Mei Moses family of indexes, reviewed art market data from 1995 through 2013 to see if there had been a noticeable shortening in the time owners held onto art. The discussion of the issue has largely focused on the postwar and contemporary markets, where there is the perception that a commodities trading approach has become prevalent. This view has been fueled by a drumbeat of headlines about flipping; the emergence of companies like ArtRank, which give “buy” and “sell” ratings for works; and the high profile of collectors who buy pieces by new artists in bulk and sell them for a handsome profit."
Read the whole story by Lorne Manly and Robin Pogrebin in The New York Times
]]>Read the whole story by Rosamund Urwin in The Evening Standard
]]>"What is new is the comprehensive and predictive way in which ArtRank seeks to monitor the market. Comprehensive, because it not only collects public information on exhibitions and auction prices, but also digital information on the artist’s visibility and popularity on social-media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as insider information about the artist’s production capacity or the amount of collector interest in his or her work. Predictive, because it does not just seek to identify who is emerging, but whowill be. Akin to the statisticians of the American supermarket Target, who, in a widely circulated news story, knew a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did, just by analyzing her spending patterns, ArtRank thinks it knows who the next successful artists will be even before the artists’ own gallerists are aware."
Read the whole story by Olav Velthius in the December issue of Texte Zur Kunst
]]>
"Works by contemporary artists born after 1945 generated $17.2 billion in worldwide auction sales last year, a 39 percent increase from 2012, according to figures just released by the French database Artprice. Last November, a triptych by Francis Bacon sold for $142.4 million, a record for any work of art at a public sale. And a handy new website, www.sellyoulater.com, now advises speculators on which hot young artists to buy, sell or “liquidate.”"
Read the whole story by Scott Reyburn in The New York Times
]]>
"The three – who identify themselves as a data scientist, a financial engineer and an art professional – have published a chart of work by emerging artists with classifications such as “Buy Now”, “Sell now”, “Liquidate” and “Purgatory”. Their analysis is not always apparently logical – for example New York-based rising star Lucien Smith, who sprays canvases with a fire extinguisher, gets both a “buy now” and a “sell now” in the listings."
Read the whole story by Georgina Adam at The Financial Times
]]>"Funny, Matisse said nearly the same thing about Picasso’s Demoiselles. Well, he actually called it Picasso’s hoax, and in those terms, sellyoulater.com may be the most modernist of art-market sites. It is spare, yellow, gridded, like Mondrian’s Broadway minus the Boogie-Woogie, and it’s bent on confrontation. Its wager appears to be that intrigue and outrage are enough to drive traffic, gain attention and, presumably, at some point, turn a profit. If Artnet can sell its reports on individual artist’s markets for $186 each, and Josh Baer can charge $250 for a subscription to his insider-ish ‘industry newsletter’, then there is money to be made as a purveyor of art-trading data, and perhaps even more if one’s methodology remains proprietary. Placebo effects aside, do you still call it ‘snake oil’ if it works?"
Read the whole story by Jonathan T.D. Neil at ArtReview.
]]>Read the whole story by Judd Tully in the October 2014 Art+Auction
]]>Read the whole story by Daniel S. Palmer at ArtNews
]]>"With respect to art’s valuation methods, there is a parallel between the increasing automation of the financial sector – aimed at the maximization of differential accumulation through the elimination of the human element5 – and contemporary tendencies in the socio-cultural realm. This is made evident by platforms such as ArtRank and Artsy. ArtRank is an art market analysis platform that uses data mining and machine-learning algorithms to inform subscribing collectors and institutions, upon payment, about the latest collecting opportunities. In doing so, it reportedly facilitated a 4,200 percent return on investments over a 16-months period (ArtRank, n.d.: para. 2). In contrast to the social interaction required by post-Internet art in the attention economy (see Moss, 2013; Troemel, 2013), ArtRank short-circuits the valuation process by ranking artists directly on the basis of their sellability. It does this through complex correlations among datasets that involve Google Trends and Instagram data, in addition to “Internet presence, auction results, market saturation, market support and CV data – education, representation, et cetera” (Goldstein, 2015: para. 58). In other words, ArtRank treats artists’ names as commodities, and sorts them according to hype on the basis of the circulatory logic of the market. As Bloomberg puts it: “ArtRank gives art the stock market treatment” (Altman, 2015). In this way, ArtRank exacerbates the condition of ‘Artists Without Art’ identified by Brad Troemel et al. (2012: para. 4). This is the condition by which artists are clustered into homogenous groups according to the activity of sorting, ranking, and matching algorithms, ultimately turning contemporary art into self-referential closed loops, so that “the artist-viewer and other artist-viewers are caught in a sphere of perpetual reception and distribution” (Troemel et al., 2012: para. 6)."
Read the whole journal article by Laura Lotti at Finance and Society
]]>"Art lists seem to be a quick fix as rankings suggest structure and organization, which give the illusion that the art world is somewhat manageable. Rankings and statistics are the metrics on which economics run and how we predict trends or certain developments, they became the currency to buy reputation. The lists fit very well in our attention economy, where content has grown increasingly abundant and attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information."
Read the whole article by Anabel Roque Rodriguez in Widewalls Magazine
]]>"2. “All the current art market models and start-ups deal with existing big data information, which only takes into consideration auction results.” This is blatantly false. ArtRank has been synthesizing data science with on-the-ground intel from an expert network since at least 2014, as founder Carlos Rivera clarified in this interview two years ago. Artsy‘s new analytics initiative under Hugo Liu sounds like it will do something similar. True, neither of those platforms is currently trying to run an art stock market."
Read the whole story by Tim Schneider at artnet.com
]]>"Due to an increasing usage of social media platforms among art collectors (ArtTacti c, 2015), it also seems reasonable to include these sources of data in the art market research. Some of the presented methods consider evaluation conducted by experts with domain knowledge (art historians in this case). Machine learning techniques could be an inspiration for future research, especially taking into account ArtRank philosophy, en route to better understand processes which are shaping the market. Another possible example is creating comparable sets in artnet price indices automatically."
Read the whole journal article by
Dominik Filipiak & Agata Filipowska in eFinanse
]]>"For Rivera this is more than idle chatter. As cofounder of the Web site ArtRank, he needs to keep his ear to the ground for up-and-coming artists. The site, launched in 2014, offers investment advice to subscribers—the current cap is ten—who pay $3,500 per quarter for early access to a ranking of emerging and blue-chip artists. Like a brokerage analyst’s report, it uses terms such as “buy,” “sell,” and the even more alarming “liquidate” to guide clients. ArtRank’s algorithm arrives at its valuations through a combination of publicly available data such as past sale prices, forthcoming exhibitions, and social media posts from art world influencers as well as insider advice from collectors and dealers."
Read the whole story by Marissa Gluck in Los Angeles Magazine
]]>Read the whole story by Nimrod Kamer in GQ
]]>Read the whole story by Miguel Ángel Garcia Vega in El Pais
]]>How will data continue to transform the business of art in years to come? To answer that question, let’s look at some of the early startups that are leveraging art data on behalf of the buyer in innovative ways... [ArtRank was] demonized by some for the categorization of artists in categories such as Sell/Peaking (“Liquidate” was a category that attracted widespread ire and has since been removed)- it has earned a place among the most disruptive firms to apply art data in new ways.
Read the whole story by Pip Deely on Invaluable
]]>Read the whole story by Simone Louis at Verve Magazine
]]>Read the whole story by Lauren Cornell and watch the video by João Enxuto and Erica Love at Rhizome
]]>Read the whole paper by Dominik Filipiak and Agata Filipowska in Financial Internet Quarterly / eFinanse
]]>Read the whole story by Edward Winkleman at The Art Newspaper
]]>"...provide advice to collectors hoping to speculate on the art market" Art in America 26 October 2016
"...rates artists according to categories that indicate their investment potential" artnet 16 October 2016
"I can’t predict if these artists will be considered eminences centuries from now, and I don’t write algorithms like ArtRank..." Goop September 2016
"Many of these [artists] became auction phenomena over the next few years, and ended up as staples of Art Rank." Artspace 16 March 2016
"...uses algorithms to analyze contemporary artists as stocks to be bought, held or sold." New York Times March 4 2016
"The art world has increasingly become something of a trendy stock market for the crème de la crème, who turn to platforms like ArtRank to literally quantify the creative labor of others into investment opportunities." Vice: Creators Projects 10 December 2015
"mirror[s] the influence of digitization" Institute of Network Cultures 10 December 2015
" There are art advisors who are hired for this, and there are also things like artrank.com and all these things that try to forecast which artist will perform well in a market and which won't..." Vice: Creators Project 5 December 2015
Dagens Naeringsliv 12 March 2015
"Don't collect with your ears" - Mr Porter March 2015
Taz 6 March 2015
- Art 2 March 2015
"Demonstrates the speed in which emerging artists rise and fall" - CounterPunch 20 February 2015
"How ArtRank became the most hated website in the art scene" - ArtInfo24 18 February 2015
"Removes art collecting from the pedestal" - Handelsblatt 10 February 2015
"Facilitates the entry of new buyers into the art market boom" - El Confidencial 7 February 2015
"Jim Cramer for the fine arts" - Forbes 2 February 2015
"Art Rank" - ArtNews 9 December 2014
Understanding value in the art world - an Oxford lecture 3 November 2014
"Artrank.com is this version of an art world perfected" - e-flux November 2014
"Heavily trending" - Evening Standard 17 October 2014
"Rocked the artworld with a radical proposal" - El Pais 2 September 2014
"Finance-savvy art strategy site" - Artsy 10 July 2014
"ArtRank’s clients get snappy, some might say brutal, investment advice" - Gulf News 27 June 2014
"May negatively influence art market" - ArtNet 24 June 2014
"Opportunist" LA Weekly 19 June 2014
"Art Dank (trill nuggs)" - Dis Magazine 13 June 2014
"Earthquake in the art market" - Calcalist 14 May 2014
"Offers powerful information to the art world" - La Tribune 25 April 2014
"ArtRank pierces through the insecurity and doubt to offer cold, hard facts." - Dazed Digital 10 April 2014
"That shit's important" - Animal NY 24 March 2014
"Fascinating and disturbing" - Zeitguide 21 March 2014
"Quantifies the emerging art market" - PSFK 17 March 2014
"The website is highly polarizing" - Business Insider 14 March 2014
"Saavy art investing tool" - Art Market Monitor 21 February 2014
"SellYouLater.com is your friend" - Complex 17 February 2014
"Anarchist art market predictors" - Artspace 13 February 2014
See also: Blackbook, Exhibition A, Art F City, Artforum
"Was Art Rank so interessant macht, ist, dass es selten offenherzige Einblicke in eine dunkle Seite des Kunstmarkts gewährt. Denn Kunstspekulation, sogenanntes Art Flipping, ist ein peinliches Thema. Kaum jemand bekennt sich offen dazu. Wer in Kunst investiert, der will nicht nur Renditen einfahren, sondern auch kulturelles Kapital."
Read the whole story by Christine Kappeler at Der Freitag
]]>
"Resetting the rules from the inside out... The controversial platform uses a proprietary algorithm to determine which artists are prime for buying, selling, or liquidating to create what he describes as “a metrics-based approach to art collecting.” Along with two anonymous partners, Rivera aims to use objective quantitative measurements to elucidate how value is applied to art objects.”
See the 2014 Power 100 list at Art + Auction
]]>"If you thought the art world was becoming rank, it got worse when ArtRank.com came along, the silly forecasting scheme said to gauge young artists’ futures based on, you got it, algorithms, also known as tittle-tattle. My colleague Deep Pockets, a perpetual font of information from the art world’s inner sanctum, relayed a story where a group of beginning-to-be-recognized artists were talking amongst themselves about what a badge of honor it was to be on Artrank’s Buy Now list, as opposed to its Liquidate list, which at the moment happens to be headed up by Lucien Smith, the bogeyman for today’s art market gone wrong (which actually makes me sympathetic to the work)."
Read the whole story by Kenny Schachter at ArtNews.
]]>"SellYouLater.com is the best art website to come along in some time. SellYouLater.com is the epitome of where we are at. It has so many amazing things going for it that I don’t know where to begin. The stock market is full of tip sheets that provide insider advice for long investors, short sellers, yield hogs and junk-bond floggers. It’s about time someone did one for art, especially now that all people really care about are prices."
Read the whole story by Adam Lindemann in the New York Observer.
]]>
"During the New York Armory art fair, many collectors were spotted with a printed table in hand, walking through the fair's stands. In the their hands was the index SellYouLater had posted in February 2014 to the internet. Their shifting of the heated rumors of the art world into cold clinical statistics is drawing anger and causing nervousness."
Read the whole story by Marcus Woeller at Die Welt
]]>