Interview: Marek Claasen, artfacts.net

artfacts.net

In short, how long has Artfacts existed and how did it all begin?

As a company since 2001. It began as a European project in the 1990s for the European Art Gallery Association. They wanted a multi-linguist portal so all the associations could put in their content, because they were afraid of what was happening with Sotheby’s and Artnet. They did not have a clue about what the Internet was, so they asked me to make this system. When the programming was finished in 2000 the Internet bubble burst and no one wanted to finance it anymore, not even the Association. Then we created the company and made the website as it is now.

Is the focus on the collectors and art buyers, so they can keep an eye on different artists' careers?

Originally the idea was to show a non-bias overlook - from the Association's point of view - on the market of the primary art galleries. But with Artfacts, we changed this because we are not an association so we wanted an overview of the world wide primary market.

So you cannot see auction results and such in your system?

It is integrated in our system by Artprice but it is only if you want to compare the different markets. The problem is that in the primary market you do not have any price information because nobody knows how much an artist or gallery is selling for or how much is sold at an exhibition or art fair, there are just assumptions. But in the secondary market you have the official hammer prices from the auctions and you just type them in and add the database instructions. This is not possible in the primary market. So we use the exhibitions as transporters and we give them a number, so each exhibition gets a price and by adding this up we can create a chart for the primary market. It is not based on prices or sales but on the curators’ eye on the exhibition. You can say that the algorithm is a modern way of art criticism because with the mathematics behind it you have certain data and equations that show a reflection of the artists’ career in the form of a chart.

The artist ranking at artfacts.net

You register exhibitions in museums, exhibition spaces and galleries and the data from this makes the chart.

Yes, we look at the location, which institution it is in and how long the exhibition lasts. So if you have a collection at a museum it is forever because the artwork stays at the institution forever. It is the longest and strongest relation you can have. The second longest is at a gallery because when a gallery decides to work with an artist it can be for decades. We consider the gallery owners as curators, because when they are making a show or collaborating with certain artists they have something in mind about why they choose to do so.

The longest and strongest relationship is between an artist and an institution, a collection or a representation and the second strongest is an exhibition because it can last for months, but maybe when the exhibition ends they never show anything by the artist again. The weakest situation in the relation between an artist and institution is during a sale, because this can take minutes! Therefore we do not look at this because it is a part of the auction business. We only look at the collections and the exhibitions.

The ranking works as follows: we first look at how many long lasting relations an artist has and in how many countries. These points are given to the institutions that the artist works with in a long-term relation. So if you have a museum with a huge international collected artist then this institution gets more points than an institution that has artists that are only rarely collected in only one country. Because we give points for countries and points for institutions. During solo shows these points are given to the artist. For a young artist for example - since he might not be part of any collection but has a solo show at Tate Modern - he would get all the points from the Tate Modern collection. This is basically how the system works. So we look at the artists with a broad worldwide collection base… The ones that have this get the most points and the young artists that have exhibitions there get the points from the old artists. We calculate this on a daily basis and every night we re-calculate so it can change every day, so you could have the ranking 560 and then the next morning you could have 561 because we add some new data. It is a highly dynamic system, a little bit like Google.

So every time you add data the ranking changes?

Even if we add data from 1998 the whole ranking will change a bit. The artist that has a low ranking will be more affected by this than the artists in the high end, but everyone gets affected. This is because we keep feeling as if we do not have enough exhibitions. Now we have 100.000 exhibitions in the system. From next year every day will be recorded and kept forever. In the future you can see the rank of for example January 1st 2008.

It will be historical records a bit like the charts on the stock market. They do not change; the dates will always remain the same. The dynamic curve will grow and change a little over night, every night. It can go up and down because we might have received some information about an exhibition in China we did not know about.

It is based on the economy of attention. So the more attention an artist gets - in this case from the curators - the better is his reputation. In our system the video artists and installation artists are quite highly ranked and photography as well. Whereas in a traditional auction database oil paintings are highly ranked. Artists who paint get a much better exposure in a secondary database which are based on auction prices, since nobody really collects video or installation art and rarely photography. It is growing, but the majority, I think about 70% or 80% of what is collected, is painting. So when you now compare these two worlds - our and the auction world - you get a quite good overview of what is going on in the art world. As a collector or just a person interested in art you have a much broader knowledge of what is going on.

Detailed chart for one artist (Jeff Koons) on artfacts.net, showing the artist's ranking over time and the auction turnover (provided by artprice.com)

The private collector will be interested in seeing the ranking on your site. They probably want to see how their investment is doing, whether the artist's ranking is going up or down...

What we do is to compare the curators' view and - with the data from Artprice - an auction database. When an artist is doing shows, it is likely that the auction turnover will rise in the following season... You often see this. When something is happening in an artist's career from the curators' point of view this will also be taken into consideration by the private collectors and vice versa. For instance on the Chinese market it is the private collectors that have pushed the Chinese artists in the Western art world. The curators did not really care about Chinese art, but because of the auction results and the private activity in China, they had a breakthrough in a different way - first having great auction results and then the exhibitions follow.

Do you think Artfacts has any influence on the market?

We know for sure that the artists have been looking at Artfacts since the very beginning of the ranking system around 2004-05. They are part of a competitive environment, every artist wants to know who is getting what show - and now they are looking at the ranking and start complaining when they are not there and are proud if they leave some colleagues behind. They use us quite often to find out where they stand at the moment because there is no other way for them to find out.

Is there an element of self-fulfillment; an artist gets a higher ranking and therefore more attention from curators and collectors, and then an even higher ranking?

When you work with social data you always have the problem with self-fulfilling prophecies, but you have the same problem when everybody is writing about a certain artist. Sure we have an impact on the art market. But we always say that the chart does not say anything about the quality of the artwork or the artist's career. It is just reflecting how social the artwork is and the same goes for the auction results and artists who sell at the highest prices. They are not necessarily the best artists of this period. It can always change. We are just a mirror of what is going on and we always say that we have nothing to do with quality, because the computer is blind and stupid. It does not know anything. We try to be as transparent and objective as possible. If anyone says something is missing, we put it in.

How does the business work? Is it the galleries and institutions who pay to keep this system going?

Our business model is that we are a free newspaper and as a free newspaper our income is from advertisements. So when the galleries want to advertise with pictures and texts, they have to pay for it. The basic information - like where and when the exhibition takes place and which artists are in it - we add whether or not they are clients, because if we did not, the system would be very biased.

It must be a huge operation to register all this data?

Yes, we are constantly struggling with this amount of data. We get hundreds of emails every day from all over the world and we have to check whether the information we have received is correct or not. People try to cheat us. I am not saying we are without mistakes but we try to control it as much as we can, and we cannot do this automatically, we have to have editors to keep an eye on the information in the database.

There must be a lot of database difficulties with all this information. For example language problems…

This is a constant problem, because when we originally designed this for the association, we thought about Europe and now it is the whole world. We have huge problems, because of the different ways of spelling. Therefore every artist has a database with name variations. If it is a Russian artist, we have all the different ways of spelling as well as the original spelling of the name of course. But we still have about 5-10% doubles or just mistakes in our system. What we did not think of in the beginning is that if an artist has an average name like Peter Möller, then this Peter Möller can be a video artist that is currently living in Berlin, but he could also be an artist from France, who lived in the eighteenth century. The same name, but different artist. But you may also have an artist that does not want us to publish their birth date, he might even want us to delete our information on him, but we cannot.

People think, that since we have this ranking system, we judge what gets thumbs up or down. I can understand this. But in this case, we always say that at a certain point you cannot go further down, but only up. For instance, if you paint abstract and there is no interest in abstract painting, abstract expressionism is completely out. So if you are an artist in this genre, you should not wonder about your ranking, it does not mean anything, especially not that you are a bad artist. Your genre might just not be fashionable at the moment. But there will come a time where it could get a comeback and then he will go up the chart again. We say, that the artists should stay on track and do what they think they should do and not think too much about what is going on in the art market. As a serious collector, you look at the work and then you decide if you want it or not. You do not look blindly at a stupid machine or chart. But it is difficult; everybody wants to be up at the top...this is how it is! It is the same for us; we are ranked at Google. There is a constant ranking for everybody. The artists should get used to this looking and publishing of figures. It is just the way things are done in this environment. The secondary market uses ranking more frequently. We know for example that Christie’s work with Artfacts on a daily basis to track down the exhibitions, because it is getting more important to get the history of the listed artwork. The turnover is faster in the art world. Now you have artworks that might come directly from the artist, compared to earlier, where a piece of work often had been with one person for many years before going on sale. What is going on in the primary market has a huge effect on the secondary market and this professionalism is a worldwide trend in the art world. In the past it was like the saying; in muddy water you catch the biggest fish, but people like us try to have transparency and un-biased objective information on what is going on, so a broader range of people can get access to the art market without being afraid of getting framed. This is also in the interest of the auction houses. Even the galleries are starting to accept and understand that this in the end will bring them a higher income and this goes for everybody involved in the art world.

I guess you follow the art market closely and have a lot of market information?

No, I would not say that. We are informed about what is going on at the galleries and in the minds of people actively working in the market. I talk to artists, the gallery owners and also the collectors. I am more interested in what their problems are and how we can better understand the art market. How can we press this to a static mathematic database, an organised system? I try to find out what these people are thinking and how I can transport this to a static way with numbers.

Thank you •