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2004 ARTPRICE FINE ART PRICE CD-ROM & ONLINE DATABASE

Click for 2007 artprice CD-ROM and online art price database reviews

Posted October 21, 2004

artprice publishes international art auction sales price records in both online database and CD-ROM formats. Their art price database products improve every year, and this year I'm going to say, for the first time ever, that in terms of overall scope, comprehensiveness, and ease of use, their products are now the best on the market.

HERE'S THE BIG NEWS: With every CD-ROM, you also get unlimited access to ALL artprice online databases including the continually updated art auction price database (currently about 3,800,000 auction records), a database that monitors upcoming auctions at 2,900 international auction houses so that you can find out when and where art by particular artists will be coming up for sale in the near future, time/price charts and graphs for any artist in the artprice database, biographical information for any artist in the artprice database, and the database of over 36,000 artist signatures, monograms, and symbols. Kids-- this is huge. It's just about all the art research you need-- accessible by CD-ROM or online-- essentially anywhere at anytime, assuming you have the necessary hardware. Here's a more detailed look at how the art price CD-ROM and databases work...

The just-released Fine Art CD-ROM, January 1987/June 2004 set contains seventeen years of art auction prices-- nearly 3,800,000 individual sales results for paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, miniatures, tapestries, prints, posters, audio visual and multimedia works, and photographs by 306,000 artists sold by 2,900 international auction houses at tens of thousands of auctions held between January 1987 and June 2004. One CD installs the product; the other CD installs the art price database. I personally tested the 2004 CD-ROM, and it's easier than ever to install (on a Mac), faster, easier to use, and much superior to the 2003 edition. BONUS: You no longer have to load the CD every time you want art prices-- the artprice application and database are now fully operational without it. This is especially good news for those of you with laptops who use artprice while on the road-- no more worrying about losing, forgetting, or breaking the CD.

Art price data can be accessed in a variety of ways including by artist, medium, title of the art, date of sale, location of sale, and auction house. Searches can also be made using multiple parameters in order to limit the number of matches, or track the auction histories of single works of art. Other more advanced search features include capabilities for searches by single words in a work of art's title or by any consecutive combination of letters within an artist's name (these come in extremely handy when you can only partially identify an artist's name, have to research specific subject matters, or have incomplete information about a work of art's title). Partial data searches on the 2004 CD-ROM are much faster than with previous versions-- another major improvement.

Additional features make analyzing an artist's auction history and price structure easier than ever. Once located, all auction records for a given artist can be arranged, either high to low or low to high, by date of sale, sale price, dimensions of the art, medium, or dates the art was created. These options save appraisers and researchers tons of time that once had to be spent scrolling through dozens, hundreds, or thousands of price results in order to assess market trends, size/price data, how subject matter impacts selling price, and so on. Appraisers use multiple criteria in order to accurately determine values, and the artprice 2004 CD-ROM is the best tool on the market for doing so.

The artprice.com online database, continually updated with the latest auction sales results, is accessible directly from the artprice database on your computer. Suppose, for example, that you want to see whether art by a particular artist has sold between the CD-ROM's cut-off date of June 2004 and the current date. Simply open an online connection, activate the artprice on your computer, bring up the artist you're researching, and then click directly from that artist's price results page to the corresponding artprice.com online results page. The artist's sales results appear chronologically beginning with the most recent sale and are catalogued by sale date, title, size, and medium. Price results and sale locations of any or all online entries are available by paying various fees directly to artprice.com. Which leads us to another major improvement-- access to the online art price database is far more affordable this year than ever before-- as little as $49 for one year's worth of access to the 3,800,000 auction record database.

Overall, the 2004 artprice CD-ROM and online art price databases are great products, and I highly recommend them for anyone who needs current art price information on a regular basis.

Fine Art, January 1987/June 2004, 3 CD-ROM set which includes all artprice online database subscriptions. artprice.com, St.-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or, France, 2004. $349 for a new subscriber. Annual update is $179 (for those who already own the 2003 CD-ROM). To order directly from the artprice website, click the artprice logo below: