The power of the internet to sell art was proved last year by the petcat of "Young British Artist" Tracey Emin (pictured). When she lost her cat, Emin made a reward notice, photocopied it and then plastered the poster around her east London neighbourhood. As soon as people realised that Emin had made the posters, they took them home and offered them on eBay, the online trading company, for £500.
This power has been clear for some time, however, on more impressive levels: namely, that price or rarity are no barrier. In June 2000, a copy of the first printing of the American Declaration of Independence, of which 25 are known to exist, sold on the website of the auctioneers Sotheby's for $8.14m, and a double portrait by Frederic Lord Leighton sold there in 2001 for half a million dollars. Nor is this only for ignorant spendthrifts; even museums have bought online.
Indeed, ignorance need not be a problem any longer, since the rise in online art trading has been accompanied by a rise in online price information, which should be the first stop for anyone new to the phenomenon. Artmarketresearch.com shows graphs of changing prices for each artist. Of particular interest is to compare the prices at auction of a single work of art that has been sold more than once. Robin Duthie, who runs the company, says: "Objectivity is replacing anecdote." Similar sites are artprice.com and gabrius.com.
Armed with such information, eBay.com is an entertaining place to see what is on offer. One can search for key words, as with search engines, and then bid (sometimes over several weeks) for a lot. The range of art is phenomenal. Indeed, more business is conducted for low-value collectibles on eBay than at Sotheby's and Christie's combined - well over $1bn per year. On the site recently was a drawing of the tower of Notre Dame in Paris, by Whistler. The vendor had posted an image not only of the picture, but a close-up of the embossed butterfly that always accompanies Whistler's signature. The range of the site, however, stretches to 16th-century herbals and Dutch Delft tiles.
But eBay is no cornucopia. Are Emin's posters worth £500? Mistakes could cost a fortune. A vendor recently offered a boat scene by the post-impressionist Paul Signac for $585,000. Since it is not featured in the catalogue raisonné, your trusty reporter emailed the vendor to ask if Franoise Cachin, Signac's granddaughter and the auction houses' authority, had authenticated it. I received no reply.
Moreover, some eBay items are stolen. Last year, some Staffordshire ceramic figures worth £14,000 were stolen from a British fair, and then turned up on eBay. Buyers should be especially careful with archaeological items.
Difficulties with cons or incompetence are exacerbated by eBay's policy of not interfering. The company recently won a case in Germany in which it claimed that it was not an auction house and so was not responsible for what was sold; so do not expect any help.
Safer than bidding on eBay proper is bidding online for items in small but respected auction houses, most of whose web sites are run via eBay. Visit liveauctioneers.com, icollector. com or pages.liveauctions.ebay. com to get started. Freeman's, Philadelphia received an online bid in the autumn of $130,000, for a tempera and gold on glass painting by the Massachusetts artist Charles Prendergast (1863-1948).
At auction houses such as Christie's (christies.com) and Bonham's (bonhams.com), all art for auction can be bought online by submitting an absentee bid, a specific price up to which one is willing to buy (which is not identical to bidding live on eBay or at auctions). Patrick Meade, senior vice-president of Bonham's, estimates that 15-20 per cent of bids are made online. Sotheby's occasionally uses eBay for sales with mass appeal, such as one of Johnny Cash memorabilia last year, but it terminated general online bidding after the dotcom implosion in spite of the $500,000 Leighton.
Many dealers are evolving into online companies, offering unique items online. Riley-Smith.com leads to the website of Old Master drawings dealer Crispian Riley-Smith, who no longer maintains an official gallery space. He recently sold over the internet a drawing of an architectural capriccio by Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) to the Kulturstiftung Museum in Dessau, Germany. Currently on offer, among others, is a vigorously sketched brown ink "Jesus among the Doctors" by Palma il Giovane (1548-1628). Riley-Smith stresses, however, that "nothing can replace looking at objects", so the serious shopper is invited to see an item in the flesh.
For illuminated manuscripts and books, a useful search tool is the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers' website at ilab-lila.com, a nexus of many booksellers, with stock searchable by key words. See the 15th-century French illuminated Book of Hours, at the Heritage Bookshop in Los Angeles (or visit heritagebookshop.com). For fine art in general there is no comparable site, but the art section of rubylane.com leads to some interesting finds, such as an 18th-century French polychrome sculpture.
Contemporary works, which usually require less authentication, are more widely available on the internet from individual galleries. The Swiss dealer Serge Ziegler (zieglergalerie.com) has no gallery space and instead deals online and at fairs, while physical galleries such as the Haunch of Venison gallery in London also sell about £1m-worth of art online per year (haunchofvenison.com).
Twentieth-century and contemporary prints are particularly easy to buy because they are both relatively cheap and easy to authenticate. This area of the online market is huge. Picassomio.com, which is run between Florida and Madrid, is a sort of amazon.com of artists' prints: it has contacts with about 500 galleries, and all the work can be bought from Picassomio directly and quickly. Do not miss the 1958 lithograph "Jacqueline" by Picasso. As with all other print dealers, works are unsigned unless otherwise stated.
A single gallery with a huge online stock is Goldmark Gallery. It runs 25 websites, each offering prints of a different artist, and it has another 100 sites that will be opened shortly. Get started at johnpiperprints.com, for work by John Piper. As well as fine prints (a lithograph of Clytha Castle sells for £1,000), there are a few genuinely original works, such as a shimmering "Tower at Warmington, Northants", for about £8,000. From this site's homepage, it is possible to visit other sites in the conglomerate, including ones on Marc Chagall and Graham Sutherland. (Do not be confused by goldmarkgallery. com, which is unrelated.)
The market for contemporary prints, often called "multiples", is also large - www.countereditions.com and Eyestorm.com offer digital prints, lithographs and so on from big names such as Damien Hirst. Eyestorm's subsidiary Britart.com has a reputation for up-and-coming artists. Prints cost around £400 each, which is not cheap for an edition of, say, 100, so buy for aesthetics rather than investment. There are certainly some fine prints, notably by Susan Derges on Eyestorm. Her River Taw series was made by exposing photographic paper without a camera under water, capturing the complexities and harmonies of waves.
Artists trying to make their name often sign up for internet representation, and many prints by such people can be seen on nextmonet.com, so called because a buyer may discover the next Monet. There are some fine pieces, but remember that most decent artists are snapped up by conventional galleries.
More striking still is art whose medium is the internet itself. No-such.com, for instance, is a Kafka-esque satire on the progress of the internet. But life imitates art: this month Christie's held an auction entitled "The origins of cyberspace", including artefacts of early technology.
The sale of art online has succeeded, in common with that of other commodities, because of its convenience, but the phenomenon will never replace the gallery or auction-house space. The business model of Eyestorm is most revealing here. Having started off by dealing exclusively online, it now sells 35 per cent online and the rest through its galleries and shop outlets.
It may be that the online houses attract new clients too intimidated to enter a minimalist or grand gallery; but there is an even stronger urge to experience works of art directly - a perfectly natural attitude to a unique object. Thus it is that Goldmark Gallery, Crispian Riley-Smith and others offer direct experience, even if their sites function well. Picassomio has a few galleries, and also offers a money-back guarantee if an object is retuned within seven days.
Nor do auction houses wish to empty their rooms, lest people no longer get carried away in the excitement of the event.
