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Artnet
Art market website From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Artnet is an art market website based in New York City. Established in 1989 to provide consumers with access to databases of historical prices paid for works of art at auction, Artnet expanded in the 1990s to host its own online auctions and provide digital platforms for art galleries to publish their exhibitions online. The website has also hosted two successive digital publications focused on art world and market news, Artnet Magazine (1996–2012), and Artnet News (2014–present).
Artnet is owned by Artnet AG, a German company previously listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Artnet AG was acquired by the American venture capital firm Beowolff Capital in 2025 and taken private.
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History and operations
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1989–1999: Founding and launch, magazine, dot-com era IPO
Pierre Sernet, a French art collector, developed a system in the late 1980s to share images of artworks and their associated prices at auction through a digital database.[1] In 1989, he founded the Centrox Corporation in New York City to monetize his new system, providing customers software for home computers that connected them to Centrox's database of art and auction prices, which the company called Artnet.[1][2]
Hans Neuendorf, a German art dealer, began to invest in the company shortly after its founding in 1989,[3] having first met Sarnet and learned about his database idea at an art fair in Paris.[1] Neuendorf also secured additional investments from a range of art patrons whom he knew from his time as a dealer.[2] By the mid-1990s, he owned around 85% of the company.[1] Neuendorf closed his art gallery in 1995 and became chief executive officer of Centrox. The company changed its name to Artnet Worldwide Corporation the same year.[2]
In 1996, the company launched Artnet Magazine, a digital publication on the Artnet website featuring art world and market reporting and criticism. Artist and critic Walter Robinson was hired as the founding editor.[4][5] The publication eventually launched French– and German–language versions of the magazine.[6][7] Artnet also established a new online system in 1996 for art galleries to display and sell work through the Artnet website.[2]
The company struggled financially in the early to mid-1990s, with not enough customers paying for access to the art and auction database service.[1][3] Financial losses throughout the decade eventually amounted to over $20 million and the primary investors mostly stopped contributing new funds. As the dot-com bubble began to build, however, market interest grew once again and a German investment firm signed on to help expand the company and plan for an IPO, bringing in additional investors in the process.[3] Artnet AG, the new German parent company of Artnet Worldwide, was established in 1998 in preparation for an IPO.[8]
In part to increase attention on the company in the lead-up to the IPO, Artnet launched an online auction system in March 1999, allowing buyers and sellers to transact completely digitally and bypass traditional auction houses.[3][9] Artnet AG went public in May that year on the tech-focused stock exchange Neuer Markt, housed within the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, bringing in €26 million of investment.[3] The stock opened at €46 a share,[1] before rising briefly to €62.[10] Several investors in the company who had purchased stock before the IPO were accused of selling their stakes when the shares had risen to their peak, before the end of the required lock-up period.[11] Although the charges of prematurely selling shares were eventually refuted,[12] the accusations, combined with renewed skepticism about the economic fundamentals of the company, led to significant sell-offs in the stock. By the end of the year, the stock was trading below €10 per share.[11]
In the late 1990s, the company joined a lawsuit led by the American Civil Liberties Union to stop enforcement of the newly passed Child Online Protection Act in the United States, a federal law to restrict access on the internet for material deemed harmful to minors.[13]
2000–2009: Financial difficulties, ending and relaunching auctions
Artnet scaled back its online auctions in 2000 to cut costs, eliminating 17% of its work force and pivoting to auctions of exclusively prints and photographs, ending its sales of paintings and other art.[14][9] It soon ended its auction services entirely, due in part to a lack of sufficient traffic to the website to sustain the sales, according to Neuendorf.[15] The online auctions lost a total of $11 million for the company.[16]
Within two years of going public, the company had spent the entirety of the funds raised from its IPO and lost a significant amount of its stock value. After debuting at €46 a share in 1999, the company was trading for 25 cents per share in 2003.[1] Artnet was one of several art market and news websites launched in the 1990s that expanded rapidly before a sharp contraction in the early 2000s, in tandem with the trajectory of the broader dot-com bubble over the same period.[1][17][18]
The company created a new financial index in 2006 to track the average prices at auction of works by the most commonly traded artists.[19] Artnet relaunched its online auction service in 2008, with Neuendorf saying the website had gained enough viewers for the auctions to be financially sustainable.[15]
2010–2019: Neuendorf steps down, end of Artnet Magazine, launch of Artnet News
In 2011, a work by Andy Warhol became the first piece to sell for over $1 million in an online Artnet auction,[20] though the average price of works sold in their auctions at the time, $6,800, was much lower. Online auctions made up around 14% of the company's income by 2011.[21]
Neuendorf stepped down as chief executive in June 2012 and was succeeded by his son Jacob Pabst.[22][6] The company simultaneously shut down Artnet Magazine, saying that the publication had struggled financially for too long.[6][7] Artnet also shuttered the French– and German–language editions of the digital magazine.[7][23] Also in 2012, Rüdiger Weng, a minority shareholder and owner of a German wholesale art business attempted to acquire an ownership stake in the company with Russian financier Sergey Skaterschikov, but failed in his bid. Weng, who had owned stock in the company since the IPO, disagreed with Artnet's focus on unprofitable media ventures and lack of dividends for shareholders.[24]
In late 2013, the year after closing Artnet Magazine, the company announced that it had hired critic and journalist Benjamin Genocchio as founding editor-in-chief of Artnet News, a new journalism-oriented digital publication on the Artnet website. Pabst said that the new publication would not include reviews or criticism, focusing exclusively on news and original reporting. Artnet News began publishing in February 2014.[25] Genocchio left the publication in December 2015 to become the head of The Armory Show, a New York art fair.[26][27] After Genocchio left Artnet News, several of his colleagues and employees accused him of sexual harassment and misconduct during his tenure at the publication, including nonconsensual groping and verbal abuse.[28][29][30] Rozalia Jovanovic, formerly a deputy editor of Artnet News, became editor-in-chief of the publication after Genocchio departed.[31]
Weng again began trying to purchase an ownership stake in Artnet in 2016 with venture capitalist Andreas Tielebier-Langenscheidt, later acquiring additional shares from investor Robert de Rothschild resulting in Weng's stake rising above 25%. Neuendorf and Artnet leadership accused Weng and Tielebier-Langenscheidt of speaking negatively about the company in the media despite being invested in the business.[24]
Artnet acquired the art market analytics firm Tutela Capital in 2016 to expand its data analysis capacity.[32] The following year, the company purchased the assets of the art sales platform Artlist.[33] Jovanovic left Artnet News in 2017 and was succeeded as editor by Andrew Goldstein, who had previously worked as editor-in-chief of the art market website Artspace's editorial content.[31]
2020–present: Company taken private
Goldstein left Artnet News in September 2023.[34]
American venture capitalist Andrew E. Wolff became the majority shareholder of the company in May 2025 through his firm Beowolff Capital. Wolff took the company private, buying out remaining shareholders and delisting it from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. The month before taking ownership of Artnet, Beowolff Capital purchased a controlling stake in the separate art market website Artsy.[35] Pabst resigned as CEO in September 2025, saying he and Wolff disagreed on the future of the company.[36]
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Products and services
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Price databases
Artnet's original core services are its databases of art prices, primarily from public auctions, giving subscribers access to historical sales results. The New York Times described Artnet's database system as the "Bloomberg terminal of the auction business".[21]
At its start and throughout the 1990s, the company provided subscribers with a software for their home computers that would allow them to access Artnet's databases through a modem internet connection.[2] Although the software was free, Artnet charged customers between $1.25 and $1.75 a minute to access the price databases.[2][37]
In 1996, the company said its databases had prices for 1.4 million artworks.[2] That figure rose to over 2 million in 1999,[8] and 3.5 million in 2007.[38]
Online auctions
Artnet first launched a system for online auctions in 1999, immediately prior to launching an IPO in Germany.[8] Although the auctions helped raise investment interest in the company,[3] they failed to attract significant numbers of buyers and sellers of art. The company scaled back its auctions in late 2000 before ending them completely soon after.[14][15]
The company relaunched its online auctions in 2008.[15] Online auctions constituted the majority of the company's revenue by the 2020s.[39]
Gallery network
In 1996 the company created an online system for art galleries to display and sell work digitally, which eventually developed into the company's gallery network. Within several weeks of launching, around 150 galleries joined the platform, mainly in New York and Germany. It originally cost galleries close to $1000 to list a full exhibition on the platform.[2] More than 1700 galleries had joined the service to create online showrooms by 2007.[38]
Auction and art fair collaborations
Artnet has also developed online art viewing and purchasing platforms in collaboration with art fairs. In 2007, the company launched a collaboration with the Swiss art fair Art Basel and its subsidiary Art Basel Miami Beach to document and display art from the fairs online.[40][41]
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References
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External links
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