Apr 14

Apr 14 Is the Future Made of Glass?

Today, I interview my good friend and colleague Christian Huhnt, who has spent the past couple of years looking for innovative ways to interact within the Art World while also trying to come up with timesaving and innovative solutions for conducting research.

Angelina: Christian, when we first met 3 years ago you introduced me to the idea behind Artwishlist, when it was still in its very early stages. Walk us again through how you came up with the concept and how it works?

Christian:I came up with the real concept while completing my MSc at the London School of Economics in Information Systems, even though I had been working on the idea since my undergraduate days, when I first started out as an art advisor. I was inspired to re-create, in a digital form, the experience of a wish list of clients I was working with at the time.

You can think of it as “Tinder” for the Art World: you can post an artwork you are looking to sell or create a wish for something you are looking to buy. The starting point is always the artist: we start by asking the collector, in this case you, irrespective of where you are in your collecting journey, which are the artists you are interested in. You can then add further information to specify the type of artwork you are interested in. This can be as specific as you like, from looking for particular titles, to searching for works from a specific series, a particular medium, or within a given price range. We developed a bespoke matchmaking technology which automatically sources all the profiles that either have access to the artwork you are looking for or are interested in acquiring what you are offering.

Our technology provides this information by protecting your privacy. The profiles you receive are anonymised and you do not know the name of the person you are matched with. You can then start a conversation with them around the artwork, and when you both feel comfortable to move onwards to the next step, you can exchange your names and contact information.

In terms of monetisation: unlike physical sales that charge a sales commission, Artwishlist charges an introduction fee, when both you and the other party agree to exchange your names and contact information. The introduction fee is not fixed, as it depends on the value of the work and the demand and/or supply for that work on the art market. This introduction fee is only charged on the proactive person – that is the person, who is the first to reach out and initiate the conversation. When that person initiates the conversation we ask them to place a deposit, typically in the range between $50-$500, which is 100% refundable if the introduction – that is an exchange of names and contact information – never takes place.

The main goal is to connect people, and offer an alternative way to meeting them in the physical world, like you would at an art fair, only that in this environment the conversations are between two individuals, akin to a private sale. We wish to facilitate connections that transcend onwards to a real transaction. However we have seen that people who were originally introduced on Artwishlist have since created long-term relationships outside our platform.

As of March 2020 we have two separate services, one of which is theartwishlist.com – the service facilitating introductions – the other, which I will talk about below is an art research database, called GLASS, which I am sure you will find of interest. Glass evolved naturally out of many years of studying the art market and through my experience working as an art advisor with many important stakeholders. We developed this service jointly with a number of prominent clients and believe to have achieved an excellent solution.

Angelina: I’m intrigued! Let’s talk about Glass as well then, given my affinity for databases. What is its purpose and how did it come to be?

Christian: Glass is the name we gave to our chat bot; think of Siri or Alexa, but specific to art. Think of it as an A.I. cataloguer that runs 24/7 and can instantly attribute and appraise an artwork.

Glass is able to identify works you send into the program and compares them against the data it holds in the database derived out of catalogues raisonnés and historic auction sales. So far it is available exclusively to auction houses enabling them to significantly cut down the time they spend researching and, vice-versa to reply to client enquiries within minutes, rather than hours or days.

Right now, this service can be accessed through WhatsApp, Telegram Messenger and Facebook Messenger, as well as through a website. It is only available to approved business users that hold a company account with us. For example, if a cataloguer or client representative at Christie’s wanted to research a particular work, they can run a search on all the books and catalogues they have in their library and receive an answer within seconds. Glass will reply with the catalogue raisonné entry, as well as with the total number of all other mentions and references in a second message. If the user wants to see those results, Glass sends it in subsequent messages in a chronological order.

Additionally, if a client wants individual data that is not yet in our database, we collect the books and relevant materials from the auction house, we digitise them by scanning, structuring and then indexing the data into an image recognition engine.

Angelina:Sounds like it could be a lengthy and time consuming process. How long does it take to scan the books and is that a service you can fulfil internally or is it outsourced to a third party?

Christian: The scanning is done by a partner in Europe, as we are a small team and this part of the project requires specialised equipment such as semi-robotic scanning solutions that leave the catalogues intact. To answer your question, on average it takes us 1-2 weeks per catalogue raisonné to fully digitise, structure the data, and be absorbed by Glass.

Angelina: What do you think this means for research? Obviously it is not intended to replace traditional research, or offer an equivalent to due diligence processes, but I can see how it can facilitate all other types of research, mainly by aiding the physical examination process.

Christian: This is precisely the reason we started with the service only catering to prints to begin with, so that specialists and generalists in auction houses can quickly check and compare physical attributes, edition size, paper type, paper size, illustration size, etc. It is important to confirm that the information provided by Glass is indeed correct. For instance, one of the reasons why Dalí prints present regular red flags is because of the large number of fakes in circulation, resulting in some auction houses making the decision to reject consignments altogether.

Now, by having instant access to critical archival data through Glass our clients can speed up and fast forward attribution and valuation work, with little additional cost overheads. On estimate, for medium-sized auction houses, Glass saves on average up to 500 hours a year in research time, which can be better allocated into more value-producing activities, such as client relations or sourcing, and thus have a direct positive ROI on the organisation. Glass also allows for quicker turnover because auction houses will be able process and catalogue more quickly, increase their online-only sales efforts by optimising their margins, as well as initiate changes in their supply chain by empowering their valuations departments.

Angelina: Why are you only making Glass available to auction houses?

Christian: We started Glass with auction houses as a B2B service first, in order to optimise and improve the service prior to opening it up to a B2C audience. Our clients receive many thousands of enquiries every year, and thus enabling us to quickly learn from their experience and optimise the service. Perfecting the service for heavy-users, I believe, will benefit all stakeholders interested in the service, once we start to open up access.

The future solution we are building will be a browsable solution with more content and more features on a subscription basis for a wider audience. Think of it like a Bloomberg terminal for the art market, just less numerical and more visual.

Angelina: That is very interesting. One of the main issues with always relying on printed catalogues raisonnés, is that all the information you get is somehow frozen in time and you always have to take the extra step of verifying every line of information.

Christian: This is what we are trying to minimise with our so called Artwork Timeline. Every time an artwork appears in the public domain, at an auction, a fair, in a museum inventory or other verified online sources, the catalogue entry for that particular artwork gets updated. With the help of machine learning through textual and visual recognition we compare the new incoming information against the database, but all the data is ultimately verified by a specialist who then updates the online catalogue entry. This way we can check that the information is authoritative and no data is erroneously added.

The Artwork Timeline will also help with assembling and converging relevant information of an artist’s body of work and specifically with artists that still lack a catalogue raisonné. Glass and the Artwork Timeline hold a lot of data and information that will help researchers and scholars compile and complete information more efficiently and elaborately.

Angelina: In your view, what is the difference between doing research with a physical catalogue raisonné as opposed to navigating a digital one?

Christian: The information that Glass provides and the Artwork Timeline is a derivative of the hard copy catalogue raisonné and it is not possible to browse that information in the same way you would in real life by turning pages in a physical catalogue. On our service, data is reorganised in completely unique new ways.

One way to browse through Glass is by ordering all artworks in its database based on the distribution of its last known location. We can easily browse through the œuvre of an artist by assembling which works are in public collections and which are in private collections.

This gives unique new possibilities to view the output of an artist, and answer questions such as: how do levels of quality compare between works in different collections? Or, which artworks are inaccessible to the market, and which ones are still held privately?

We believe that the established academic, chronological view no longer suffices to serve the needs of the stakeholders involved. Lastly, the Artwork Timeline provides a significant advantage over the physical catalogues. When these are published they are rarely updated, and as a result their information is out-of-date, often by many years or even decades. With the Artwork Timeline we are updating the information of what is known from the catalogue raisonné, giving you an always up-to-date snapshot of the artwork in question.

Have you ever browsed through an auction catalogue reading the note of a lot that tells you: “this work will be included in the forthcoming publication of the artist’s catalogue raisonné or the supplement” and then left wondering when that will be? We are adding these works to their associated online catalogue once such work comes up at auction or elsewhere, thereby automatically updating the catalogue raisonné information, irrespective of any nebulous future publication date of an imaginary catalogue in the planning.

Angelina: So, every time the entry gets updated it effectively can change the provenance of the work. Is there a way to track these changes as a subscriber and being able to see the timestamp of every update?

Christian: Funny! You asked me this exact question two years ago, and since then, we have sketched out this feature for one, to be included in our future roadmap. We will have a source time stamp once every entry is updated and that time stamp can be “reported” in a crowd-sourced fashion, so you can rest assured.

Design and Photography ©️ Ioannis Sarakasidis