During these uncertain times, art auctions have adapted to the difficult circumstances—and have managed to come out ahead. Their use of technology—augmented reality (AR), online portals, and virtual interactions—has enabled artists and art auction houses to increase sales—and may have transformed the way art is auctioned forever.
Even before COVID-19, online auctions were gaining a following. Buyers headed online or phoned in to participate in them. However, in-person sales still dominated. The pandemic forced the industry to change over the course of just a few months.
A recent Sotheby five-hour auction drew in just over $362 million, with a Francis Bacon triptych selling for $84.6 million and a Jean-Michel Basquiat drawing selling for $15.2 million. It was the highest successful online bid in Sotheby’s history.
Similarly, a Christie’s auction brought in $420 million during its July livestream event. While the revenue from online auctions is still lower than in-person auctions, the online auctions that occurred had a much bigger audience. Christie’s had over 100,000 online viewers, and the number of viewers is growing. In an October online auction, sales totaled $341 million, but the audience increased to 280,000.
The two auction houses have adapted to a new hybrid model, and many other auction houses have followed suit.
Augmented Reality: An in-Person Alternative
As hefty, glossy catalogs give way to more extensive online offerings and in-person visits to an AR view of how the art will look in your mansion, simply by pointing your iPhone at the wall, tech millionaires will no doubt question the need for in-person auctions to exist at all.
Auction houses like Christie’s are relying on AR/virtual reality (VR) technology to bring in more customers and market their work, which has become a hit as the pandemic has worsened.
This year, Christie’s used “superzoom” technology to enable users to examine the art being auctioned in great detail. According to the company, buyers can zoom in to details far beyond what can be seen with the naked eye to view every brushstroke and minute detail.
The experience, meant to enhance the client’s connection with the artwork, is powered through AR. Clients can interact with the feature on Christie’s mobile app and view masterpieces by Rothko, Picasso and Monet, as well as affordable prints and works on paper by the Old Masters.
The most common way to use AR is through a smartphone using a variety of apps or websites.
Computer vision allows a smartphone to understand the user’s environment through its camera feed. The computer vision gathers data about semantics, recognizing what is in the camera’s view, such as a blank wall, as well as 3D geometry, recognizing the place and angle where the phone should display the content. The 3D geometry allows the content to look anchored to the physical object, which uses concepts from projective geometry (the relationships between geometric figures and the projected images on another surface). It then shows the digital content realistically through a process called rendering.
Social Distancing and the Rise of Innovative Digital Platforms
The U.S. and governments across the world have placed many travel restrictions and social distancing regulations in place to stop the coronavirus outbreak. As many industries try to cope with the changes these regulations have brought about, art auction houses are moving their resources to expand online portals.
Christie’s has made their auctions and bidding fully accessible online through their app. The art company has been livestreaming its auctions to bring the online salesroom right to a user’s home. Clients can also browse and bid through the company’s online auctions during a set period, which offers select works at a better price point.
Sotheby’s is also offering online auctions through its multicamera global livestreams, which consist of eight large screens, designed for auction specialists from across the world to bid in real time. Online bidders have more interactivity and personalization than before, with a dedicated screen. The company’s auctions generated $363.2 million and sold 93 percent of available art pieces—a major increase from the $80 million Sotheby’s garnered from last year’s online bids.
The famous art house has taken things one step further by including machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) with its online auctions. The Phillips app allows clients to browse upcoming sales as well as track, save and share their favorite lots or artists.
The company has paired up with Articker, a searchable technology platform, which compiles data from thousands of online publications and editorial sources and provides key information on artists, artworks and market trends. The open-source AI tool, developed in 2014, gathers data from over 5,000 articles and 16,000 news sources daily for information on around 150,000 artists. It operates algorithmically to track and score each artist based on their media, exhibition and gallery presence. The database offers real-time analysis of the most influential and top artists that users can keep an eye on.
The New Era of Interacting, Going Virtual
As many people lock themselves indoors, art auction houses are trying to break down those barriers.
Christie’s has launched multiple virtual tours of real galleries, such as its Latin American Art in New York and The Collector Tour at Christie’s in London. The technology allows viewers to immerse themselves in the art and capture the physical essence of the works inside their own homes.
Navigating through these virtual spaces is as simple as with any website, but the technology means the client can interact with the 3D objects and move through the environment using the latest VR and 3D technology.
Since the beginning of the pandemic and long before that, VR has allowed the public to use their imagination and explore physical spaces over the great web. The technology behind it is quite simple. It is essentially composed of hundreds or thousands of photographs that provide a whole unbroken view. The pictures are combined with overlapping fields of view to produce a high-resolution image.
To create the prototype, a camera is set up on a tripod and placed at a central point. It then continuously takes pictures while rotating. Around half of the pictures—if not all of them—must overlap at the start point for the software to automatically stitch them together. The editor can then manually adjust or edit some of the pictures. The last step is to add any narration, hotspots, navigation, or interaction points and transitions between the pictures.
The creator can use software like Pixtra PanoStitcher v1.5 to stitch together pictures and adjust the overlap between them, Easypano Tourweaver v5 to import the panoramas and integrate sound, Adobe Photoshop to adjust the color balance or brightness, and Sony Sound Forge 8.0 to record and edit sounds.
With VR technology, the future of how we interact with art is adapting quickly. This global movement is allowing art to become more accessible to the public while preserving our cultural heritage, history and national treasures.
The Future of Art Auctions
Though auction houses are now embracing the pandemic-era changes, they must rely on their traditional audiences to do the same. Luckily, the changes have brought in new clients that augment the traditional audience that has been able to adapt. New patrons to the art house accounted for 35 percent of the purchases at Christie’s.
It appears that online sales are continuing to grow, with half of Christie’s sales this year occurring via the Internet or telephone. In 2019, this the Internet and phone segment was less than 10 percent of the auction house’s sales.
Will auction houses return to in-person auctions once vaccines help put COVID-19 under control? With an exploding audience, better visualizing and inspections tools, and the advantage of opening doors to let attendees in from anywhere in the world, what reason could there be for turning back?