Whatever aesthetic value art has for you, it will have a price on the open market. Many works of art that affect the emotions of the viewer are created to be sold for what the market will bear. ArtPrice is an index of how well or poorly the art market is performing generally and how artists are performing in particular. What are the trends? Who’s hot, who’s not?

ArtPrice, a new database in UVA’s collection, offers an alphabetical index of 768,883 artists whose works have been sold or will soon be offered in Fine Arts and Design auctions. The information includes results for 13,484,600 auctions involving 889,000 works of art listed over the last 12 months from 6,300 auction houses around the world.

The ArtPrice resource is about more than art’s monetary value to collectors and investors, however. The profiles of auction houses and the types of art they handle will be of help to new artists looking to market their work. Researchers in art history, cultural history, and media studies will find bios of artists and information about historical movements.

For instance, a sample entry offered by ArtPrice on the early 20th century Soviet abstract expressionist Wassily Kandinsky includes:

• Biographical information, how in 1911 he published the first theoretical writing on abstraction and produced what is considered the first non-figurative watercolor of Modern Art.
• A link to personal and professional information, what media he worked in, what movements and styles, titles of selected works, auction results dating from 1937.
• Links to recent auction results including thumbnail images of his work.

View the following video and learn more about using ArtPrice, which can be found in the Library’s A-Z Databases list.