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2005 ARTPRICE FINE ART PRICE CD-ROM & ONLINE DATABASE

Posted November 11, 2005

artprice publishes international art auction sales price records in both online database and CD-ROM formats. Their art price database products improve every year, this year they're better than last year (faster, for one thing), and in terms of overall scope, comprehensiveness, and ease of use, their products are the best on the market.

Plus with every CD-ROM, you get one year of unlimited access to ALL artprice online databases including the continually updated art auction price database (currently over 4,100,000 auction records), a database that monitors upcoming auctions at close to 3,000 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. It's pretty much all the basic art research anybody needs-- accessible by CD-ROM or online, Mac or PC-- essentially anywhere anytime, assuming you have the necessary hardware. Here's a more detailed look at how the art price CD-ROM and databases work...

The new Fine Art CD-ROM, January 1987/June 2005 set contains eighteen years of art auction prices-- over 4,100,000 individual sales results for paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, miniatures, tapestries, prints, posters, audio visual and multimedia works, and photographs by 309,000 artists sold by nearly 3,000 international auction houses at tens of thousands of auctions held between January 1987 and June 2005. One CD installs the product; the other CD installs the art price database. I've tested the 2005 CD-ROM, it's simple to install (I use a Mac but I'm sure it's the same for a PC), faster, easier to use, and better than previous editions. BONUS: You don't have to load the CD every time you want art prices-- the artprice application and database are fully operational without it. This is especially good for on-the-road laptop price research-- no more worrying about losing, forgetting, or breaking the CD.

Art price data is accessible 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 2005 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 either directly from the artprice database on your computer or independently from the artprice website. Suppose, for example, you want to see whether art by a particular artist has sold between the CD-ROM's cut-off date of June 2005 and the current date. Simply open an online connection, activate 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 (or go straight to the artprice website and do it entirely online). The artist's sales results appear chronologically beginning with the most recent sale and are catalogued by sale date, title, size, and medium.

Overall, the 2005 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 2005, 3 CD-ROM set including one year of artprice online database subscriptions. artprice.com, St.-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or, France, 2005. $369 for a new subscriber. Annual update is $259 (for those who already own the 2004 CD-ROM). Order directly from the artprice.com website.