Artists, Privacy and Being Fair
An artist whose work is featured on ArtList wrote us a message
Hi Astrid,
How am I to keep records of the work being sold on your website anonymously without info? Will you send me the details of who is selling the work and when it is sold I will need to know for how much and to whom?
Thank you,
▒▒▒
Here is our answer
Dear ▒▒▒,
Thank you for your question. I wanted to give you some more background about who we are and what we believe in when it comes to privacy.
ArtList is an online marketplace where collectors can buy and sell fine art confidentially. Because we believe in peer to peer, you are free to send a message directly to the seller (as you already did), but it’s up to the seller if he wants to answer.
We guarantee privacy of our users, and will never share information about them or about the private deals they have on ArtList.
That said, what we’re doing with ArtList goes beyond just making it easier to resell art. I think it’s important to mention this.
We charge a 10% commission on works sold and share this commission 50–50 with the artist, which means if a work by you gets sold on ArtList you will net 5% or the total sales price. You’ll receive a check. We think it’s fair.
As I’m sure you know, the secondary art market is extremely active, both private and auctions, and artists gets mostly nothing from it. By choosing to sell on ArtList, as opposed to selling privately or at auction, the seller knows you’re getting revenue from the sale.
Another effect of ArtList is that we prevent many works from going at auction. Deals that happen on ArtList are private (the deal amount is not published) which helps you control your market.
So this is what we offer artists: you get revenue but you don’t get to know who the seller is and what was sold precisely. Arguably it’s better than today’s private market: not get any revenue AND not knowing the deal even happened.
I’d love to hear from you, and I hope you’ll support us in making the art market faster, more secure and also more fair.
Astrid
We deeply care about Privacy, and we deeply care about Being fair to artists. If you want to read more about our values you can go to https://artlist.co/values.
We want to make the art market fast, secure and fair. We think artists, collectors and dealers will benefit greatly from this — and we’re always thrilled to explain to everyone why.
Astrid, Kenneth and Team ArtList
