by phoenixT
According to UBS and Art Basel Art Market Report 2018, 68% of art work buyers are private collectors, compared to local and national museums which only have 5% of the sales. To illustrate, the world of private collections is a “murky universe”, where the public is hard to access and collections might be saved in storage.
“Collecting used to be like a private club with people who were very traditional in their privacy” said Ronald Varney, an independent fine art adviser in New York. “Nowadays, when buying art works, it’s often ‘How much publicity can I get out of this?’” Furthermore, when a picture of a work is sent to multiple private collectors, or when a piece is sold out anonymously on the artist’s website, the networks between artists, dealers, and collectors, have been partly dissolved.
In contrast, Internet has changed some people’s mind.
“You can’t really have an understanding of art and artists if you have only seen 5% of their world. ”
says Jessica and Evrim Oralkan, the founder of Collecteurs.
That’s why Jessica and Evrim Oralkan, the founder of Collecteurs, set up their online private collections website. “Not everybody has the resources to open a private museum,” Mr.Oralkan said. “Therefore, private collectors, who wants to share their work with public, are looking for alternative options, and those are most likely going to be digital.”
Collecteurs is more like a social network. Its founders say that the platform isn’t geared toward buying and selling, but rather as another way of getting access to information about where the art is. In addition to sharing, art collectors are seeking tools to organize growing collections and to connect online with gallerists and curators.
It seems like social media is a double-edged sword for private collections. On the one hand, it is regarded that the Internet has promoted anonymous exchange and has weakened the importance of social ties. On the other hand, some online platforms like Collecteurs are attempting to create resources for scholars, academics students, art lovers and other collectors, which opens up the art market and makes it more easy to interact among artists, dealers, curators and audience.
From this we see, whether promoted anonymous exchange or bring private collections in the light of Internet, social media is making a growing gap between collectors who post their work online and collectors who hold their work on their wall.
See a video about Collecteurs mission; See more about Collecteurs and its news
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