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The Editorial of our Spring 1999 issue.
In mid April, the art world's movement into cyberspace accelerated to a new level as eBay, the Internet marketing giant founded in 1995, announced plans to acquire the venerable West Coast auction house of Butterfield & Butterfield. In its four years of business, eBay has become an enormous presence in on-line trading in a vast array of collectibles, ephemera, commercial products, and, to a limited degree, fine art. Its site contains more than 1000 categorized divisions and over 250,000 new lots are added daily to be exposed to more than two million registered users. EBay plans to take advantage of Butterfield's expertise in premium markets and extensive relationships with dealers, auction houses, and individuals throughout North America, Europe, and Asia to create an "International Gallery" that it hopes will feature the largest warranted group of fine art and antiques on the Internet. The specifics of the relationship between the companies have yet to be announced or even fully explored, but Butterfield & Butterfield plans to continue its normal auction schedule augmented by exposure to eBay's huge audience.
EBay is not alone in its efforts to market fine art on line. Artnet.com held its first on-line auction at the end of March in which more than 100 works were consigned by galleries and private dealers. The lots, with estimates ranging from $2,500 to $250,000, included works on paper, paintings, and sculpture, largely Modern and Contemporary. Reportedly, at least at the outset, bidding was less than energetic. Amazon.com's first on-line auction, held at about the same time, got off to a livelier start, thanks perhaps to its enormous customer base. Sotheby's and Christie's are also developing on-line ventures.
Virtual shopping has become a favorite sedentary pastime and there is widespread faith in its future, as the $62.8 million raised in eBay's initial public offering attests. It is easy to view with alarm the idea of shopping for art in this context. Does it in fact represent a dumbing down of the art market, or can it be seen as an opportunity to elevate public taste by making the possibility of owning an original piece of art more widespread? There was grave concern of a similar nature when art collections began to be made available on disk and when Microsoft acquired its enormous inventory of art images for reproduction. Yet for a variety of reasons attendance at museums seems to be on an upswing. The advent of the Internet was supposedly the end of books, and indeed it has had an impact on publishing. But books are still bought and sold and show little sign of going away.
We can hope that the new combinations of expertise in connoisseurship and marketing represented by eBay's acquisition of Butterfields will be structured in ways that are beneficial to the public. If this is to happen, consumers must insist on high ethical standards and should not settle for works presented in a manner inconsistent with their meaning. Demand for authenticity and integrity, of both the object and the seller, must not be compromised. If promoting the sale of works of art on the Internet is done in an appropriate manner, it can widen awareness of art and culture from all parts of the world, enriching us in many ways. If not, it will be just another nail in the coffin of Western civilization.
-Jonathan Fogel