Can I Use Data to Beat Christie's Auction Estimates?

Post by muglug » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 4:07 PM UTC

Artnome wrote: post #10

muglug wrote: post #4

Artnet has been doing the same basic analysis (finding comparable artworks and calculating the worth of a piece of art) for over a decade. They offer theirs as an add-on to their price subscription service: https://www.artnet.com/analytics-reports/

Thanks for reading, Artnet is awesome. To my knowledge they do not have a database looking at all known works by artists, they focus on works sold at auction. This makes sense as they cover much larger group of artists and info on complete works is typically not available for the majority of artists.

Yes – I think the point of sticking just to open auctions is so that the prices and indexes they have represent what the market thinks of an artist and particular works.

Post by jaclaz » Mon, Aug 07, 2017, 4:54 PM UTC

Artnome wrote: post #9

jaclaz wrote: post #7

I wonder what is the point. It seems to me like a back-justification of something not measurable analitically. A 5 millions US$ bracket is not in any way an approximation. IF you had narrowed the interval (and IF the picture is at the auction sold within it), then all your data mingling exercises might have some usefulness, otherwise it is just an arbitrary estimation like the one from Christie's. So the similarity c…

Thanks for reading, I hope to improve the analysis over time. I spent the last three years building a unique database that contains the complete paintings of ~40 of the best known artists of the twentieth century. I was motivated by reading about the large percentage of works that are forged or misattributed. I had always just assumed there was a single database listing how many works artists created, average size of…

>Thanks for reading, I hope to improve the analysis over time.

Good, but I don't see the analysis at all.

I mean you are betting (without any actual money which is good) on the actual auction price of something in the future.

The auction price of a work of art - by definition - is not in any way like the actual market value of anything (it will be MUCH lower or MUCH higher or JUST ABOUT right) depending on a zillion factors that have nothing to do with the actual value of the piece.

And you have so few data points that a statistical approach is mostly meaningless, let alone one based (in the case of a study) based on the differences between it and the final painting.

You could use a few sessions of flippism and get a similar value.

Or count the number of unique RGB colours in the (photos of) the paintings and give each one a value between 1,217 and 23,146 US$ depending on brightness , later multiplied by the square root of the year it was painted and arrive to a same "mathematical" estimation.

Re: Can I Use Data to Beat Christie's Auction Estimates?

Re: Can I Use Data to Beat Christie's Auction Estimates?