Click for 2004 artprice CD-ROM and online art price database reviews.

Posted October 17, 2003

artprice.com, a major international art auction price database and publisher of art auction price results, has released Fine Art CD-ROM, January 1987/June 2003 . The two CD-ROM set contains sixteen years of art auction prices comprising 3,500,000 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 2003. One CD installs the product; the other CD is used for price research. Artbusiness.com's tests of the 2003 artprice.com CD-ROM set find it to be easy to install (on a Mac), fast, comprehensive, easy to use, and generally superior to the 2002 edition. In fact, the artprice CD-ROM gets better every year and this year, it's better than ever.

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 (Artbusiness.com favorites that 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). These partial data searches used take a while to complete, but this year's CD-ROM is far faster than last year's and speed is one its major improvements over previous versions.

Additional features make analyzing an artist's auction history and price structure easier than ever. Once located, all auction records for any individual artist can be arranged, either high to low or low to high, by date of sale, sale price, dimensions of the art, or dates that the art was created. These options save researchers the time involved in 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 need to make determinations using these multiple criteria in order to produce accurate final valuations and the artprice 2003 CD-ROM is the best tool on the market for doing so.

The artprice.com online database, constantly updated with the latest auction records, is accessible from any artprice.com CD-ROM. Suppose, for example, that a researcher wants to see whether art by a particular artist has sold between the CD-ROM's cut-off date of June 2003 and the current date. He simply accesses the artist's price results on the CD-ROM, goes online, and then clicks directly from the CD-ROM 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. These fees can get a little steep, topping out at around $15 to $20 for a single artist's biography, and should be used sparingly. In most cases, these little bits of extra online data are either available elsewhere, or not that essential.

Overall, the 2003 artprice.com CD-ROM set is a great product. It's easy to install, easy to use, and Artbusiness.com highly recommends it for anyone who needs current art price information on a regular basis. Go for it!!

Fine Art, January 1987/June 2003 , 2 CD-ROM set. artprice.com, St.-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or, France, 2003. $419 ($449 after 10.31.03). Annual update is $135 (for those who already own the 2002 CD-ROM; $145 after 10.31.03). Order directly from the artprice.com website.