Buying Art By Email

When asked at the opening if the Tom Friedman show had really sold out in three days, director Deborah McLeod of the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills replied, “More like three minutes.” It’s another sign of the acceleration of the contemporary art market: New works, even in the six-figure range, are selling by digital image alone. For the Friedman show, Gagosian set up a private section on its Web site, accessible only by a password sent via e-mail message to select collectors. More typically, gallery directors send off e-mail messages with JPEGs — a format for digitally storing and transmitting images — to potential clients. As with so many aspects of the art world, industrywide figures do not exist. But anecdotes abound. Howard Read of Cheim & Read in Manhattan said the gallery sold by JPEG alone “about a third” of its current show: paintings of Mexican-American laborers by the California artist John Sonsini, with prices from $25,000 to $65,000. In Los Angeles, Timothy Blum of Blum & Poe said he sold a “handful” of works by the conceptual artist Dave Muller, sight unseen, from his January show, at prices up to $100,000. “This happens routinely now,” he said. “I’ve also sold paintings by Mark Grotjahn, for over $200,000, to buyers who never saw them in person.” But Mr. Blum was quick to add that these buyers already knew Mr. Grotjahn’s work, an off-kilter updating of abstract painting. Other gallerists made the same point. This is not the case of an Internet surfer discovering a picture on an e-commerce site and tossing it in a shopping cart, but more a sign of how efficient the high-end contemporary art market has become. (For full article by Jori Finkel in The New York Times click the Headline). Irish Art