The Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Museum team up on a commercial website for art. Plans include selling commissioned design products and offering educational programs such as live webcasts of lectures and concerts. It will also carry archival material on art. Profits from the site will help pay the museums' operating expenses. Now it's closer to five than 500.
Art galleries discover that many people prefer the comfort of choosing art online.
By some estimates, there are currently some 20,000 Web sites involved in selling art, and more are on the way. Marketing experts say these sites will permanently alter the way art is sold and radically expand the market. Whether the sudden flood of art sites is truly the dawn of a new era bringing riches to sellers and creators of art or just a shift down-market disguised as technological progress, only time will tell. Venerable Sotheby's got the Dotcom bug last week and went online. But galleries sell elitism, says one gallery director.