Art World Players Rethink the Auction Marketplace

Collectors have long enlisted dealers or auction houses to help resell their art holdings because such insiders typically have up-to-date pricing data and access to potential buyers.

Now, in the latest challenge to the art world’s status quo, a team led by former Sotheby’s rainmaker Adam Chinn plans to launch a peer-to-peer digital marketplace later this month that will invite collectors to sell high-end art to each other, directly and anonymously. Listings in an early version of the site, called LiveArt Market, include an Andy Warhol “Rorschach” from 1984 valued around $200,000 and Jack Pierson’s 2009 sign, “Glory,” valued around $85,000.

The move comes as all sorts of art-world players rethink the traditional ways art gets traded online, from former Christie’s auctioneer Loïc Gouzer’s Fair Warning auction app to the proliferation of digital platforms selling NFT artworks. Even as the art world’s attention increasingly pivots back to in-person art events including fairs, online sales of luxury goods remain robust and some top industry dealmakers see a bigger market opportunity in finding fresh ways to sell art to collectors accustomed to shopping for art online.

“Collectors go to gatekeepers because they need pricing info, but we want to put collectors in control,” said Mr. Chinn, Sotheby’s former chief operating officer. Late last year, he teamed up with artificial-intelligence experts and former auction specialists like George O’Dell to buy and retool Live Auction Art, then an auction-tracking data site. The new owners have now equipped the site, renamed LiveArt, with machine-learning technology so it can analyze auction data and give users free, real-time estimates of their collection’s likely market value. The key to success will be convincing collectors that LiveArt’s pricing and provenance services are as reliable as those collectors would get from the auction houses.

The architect behind the tech is Boris Pevzner, a graduate of MIT known for creating and selling several companies that use AI-driven algorithms, including one that resolves freight-shipping issues and another that manages art collections, Collectrium, that he sold to Christie’s in 2015.