You’ve Seen the E-Mail, Now Buy the Art, NY Times

FOR his fall show the artist Tom Friedman planted two dozen characteristically demented sculptures throughout the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. He set a giant Excedrin box, made from dozens of cut-up Excedrin boxes, on the floor near the entrance. He placed three identically crumpled wads of paper on a shelf. And he affixed to the ceiling a bunch of colorful papier-mâché balloons, which magically appeared to float despite their weight. Their strings were held together not by a hand but by a pair of men’s briefs suspended in midair.

It was Mr. Friedman’s first outing with Gagosian after years of showing at the much humbler Feature Gallery in New York, and the exhibition sold out, with works priced up to $500,000. But most of the buyers did not see the installation. They did not personally see the pieces at all. Gagosian sold out the show before it opened, in large part through a flurry of e-mail messages and digital images.

When asked at the opening if the show had really sold out in three days, Deborah McLeod, the gallery’s director, 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.

The Chicago dealer Kavi Gupta has presold — in large part through JPEGs — his current exhibition of paintings by Claire Sherman, a 2005 graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “We debuted a painting at Basel last year, and Marty Margulies bought it,” he said, referring to a major Miami collector. “Since then we’ve been selling her work based on digital images.” The show opened this weekend, but it has been sold out since December, with prices up to $15,000.

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.

“I don’t know if this is the beginning of something wonderful, or the end of something wonderful,” said Amy Cappellazzo, co-head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s. “But we’ve seen the use of JPEGs increase dramatically, exponentially, in the last few years. It’s all about the speed of the market. Without the use of digital images, this market would come to a grinding halt.”

Lisa Schiff, a New York art consultant, agreed, saying that “99 percent” of her sales now involve a JPEG at one stage or another. “It’s changed the way we all do business,” she said. “People have begun using JPEG as a verb: JPEG me this work.” (On the resale market, where many art consultants operate, JPEGs can be shopped so widely that a seller can find himself in the puzzling position of being offered his own work.)

Mr. Gupta said about half of his sales take place without the presence of the buyer. “Being in Chicago, without the walk-in traffic of a gallery in New York or even L.A., I can’t imagine working without digital images,” he said. “We have a ton of European collectors, and we reach them through art fairs and digital images, a combined effort.” Read the whole article.