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2006 artprice CD-ROM & Online Database Products

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

Posted October 10, 2006

artprice, a major publisher of international art auction sales price records in both online database and CD-ROM formats releases the latest version of their CD-ROM covering international auction sales held between January 1987 and June 2006. Their art price database products get better every year, particularly from ease-of-use and speed standpoints (for example, the program locates and sorts Picasso's nearly 20,000 auction records in less than 30 seconds-- even on my clunky old computer). Improvements are also evident with respect to overall scope and comprehensiveness of data. Conclusion? artprice products are the best on the market.

With the purchase of the 2006 CD-ROM, you also get an entire year of unlimited access to ALL artprice online databases including the continually updated art auction price database, a service that monitors upcoming auctions at nearly 3,000 international auction houses so you can track when and where art by particular artists is coming up for sale, price charts and graphs for any artist in the database, basic biographical information for any artist in the artprice database, and images of over 36,000 artist signatures, monograms, and symbols. In other words, that's basically all art research tools anybody needs-- accessible by CD-ROM or online, Mac or PC-- anywhere, all the time, assuming you're connected to the internet. Here are some details about how the art price CD-ROM and databases work...

The nineteen years of auction records on the Fine Art CD-ROM, January 1987/June 2006 include 4,500,000 individual sales results for paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, miniatures, tapestries, prints, posters, audio visual and multimedia works, and photographs by 342,000 artists sold by nearly 3,000 international auction houses many many thousands of auctions held between January 1987 and June 2006. One CD installs the product; another installs the art price database. The 2006 CD-ROM is simple to install (I had no problem on my Mac), faster, smoother, easier to use, and much improved over last year. And you no longer have to load the CD every time you want art prices-- the artprice application and database work perfectly without it (especially good for you on-the-road laptop researchers).

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 options include capabilities for searches by single words in a work of art's title, and my favorite-- searching by any consecutive combination of letters within an artist's name (extremely handy if you can only read part of a signature, have to research specific subject matters, or have incomplete information about a work of art's title). For example, I searched the database for artist names containing the letter combination "lind" and got 513 names in about 2 seconds. LOVE IT!

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 paging through cumbersome reference books or 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.

As for the artprice online database, it's continually updated with the latest auction sales results, is accessible either directly from the CD-ROM on your computer or independently through 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 2006 and the current date. All you do is 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 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 2006 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 2006, 3 CD-ROM set including one year of artprice online database subscriptions. artprice, St.-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or, France, 2006. $389 for a new subscriber. Annual update is $259 (for those who already own the 2005 CD-ROM). To order directly from the artprice website or learn about other artprice products and subscription options, click the artprice logo below: