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Buying Art for Your Home With the Click of a Mouse

These days, the seller is less important than the object being sold

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Among online-only gallery sites, Saatchi Art proves prominent with offerings of art from a vast international network.

saatchiart.com
Among online-only gallery sites, Saatchi Art proves prominent with offerings of art from a vast international network.
saatchiart.com

Buying art, like most anything else these days, needn’t require more than a screen-scanning eye and a free finger or two to click around online. Savvy web denizens, with or without a clear directive in mind, can find their way to distinguished art throughout the ages — to be bought, processed, shipped and delivered with little or no gallery-going involved.

"Increasingly we’re seeing people work toward trying to improve the business of selling art by reaching out through digital means," said Marion Maneker, publisher of Art Market Monitor, a resource for market consultation and analysis.

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"One of the great things about the digital expansion is that it makes it much easier, if you’re looking for something fairly recondite, to be able to find it in different places," said Ms. Maneker "It flattens out the search and makes it less important who the seller is than what the object is."

Sellers are still a significant part of the equation, though, and they can range from traditional auction houses like Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips to different kinds of enterprises that thrive solely on the web.

A heady home for the prospective beginning art buyer is Artspace, a hub for sales as well as illumination by way of expert editorial content by writers and critics steeped in the art world’s engaging, but often arcane means and ways. An affiliation with the prestigious art-book publisher Phaidon adds to the allure, and in the midst of offerings of striking works of contemporary art are biographies of artists as well as interviews and articles to help provide wider context, such as "Color Theory 101: How To Perfectly Pair Artworks in Your Home Using the Color Wheel" and "What Was Post-Minimalism?: A Primer."

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Artsy takes a similarly wide-angle approach to serving as a bridge between buyers and sellers, which include galleries, museums and institutions offering works for prices ranging "from $100 to $1,000,000." On pages for particular works, you can contact the seller directly to ask about pricing and details relating to sales, and Artsy Specialists can be contacted as well for queries of different or more discrete kinds. Artsy is also engaged with what it calls the Art Genome Project, an initiative to classify works with more than 1,000 specific attributes so as to present the prospective buyer with additional options for other works that he or she might like.

In addition to news and reviews from staff reporters and critics, Artnet offers a suite of products that can be useful in direct and indirect ways, including a price database touted as the most comprehensive archive of auction results in the world. The figures within it span 30 years and transactions from more than 1,700 auction houses, with results logged for future use and consultation by appraisers, dealers and collectors. Artnet’s own auctions also feature work for sale in many different media, with ways to buy and otherwise track artists as new work goes to market.

Among online-only gallery sites, Saatchi Art proves prominent with offerings of art from a vast international network. Those willing to spend more than $1,000 can work with a designated curator who provides Art Advisory services, to be granted after answering a brief questionnaire related to desires and tastes. And groupings on the site itself aid in browsing with curated selections enlisted by themes such as "New Figurative Art" and "Contemporary Takes on Surrealism."

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Fine art mingles with other forms like furniture, jewelry, fashion and interior design at 1stdibs, a site that began by showcasing dealers from Paris and New York before expanding worldwide. Vintage tables and fanciful ceramics go up for sale among paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints and works on paper .

And once a prized purchase is made, the online buyer can find services of most conceivable kinds at the Clarion List through its searchable global database. Service providers range from framers and lightning firms to security agencies and storage.

"Before in the art world, everything was done by word-of-mouth referrals and people had their little black books," said Jessica Paindiris, who co-founded the Clarion List after working in marketing at Christie’s.

Now those little black books are open for all to see by way of user reviews left under listings for services that can be hard to find otherwise.

"No one ever catalogued the art world before," Ms. Paindiris continued. "We’re the Yelp for art."