Recap: A Work in Progress: Buying Art on the Web - Yazy's at www.willaimverdult.com

The Wall Street Journal online, stated that "as art lovers descend on London this week for the opening of a glitzy art fair called Frieze, art sales have never been hotter at galleries and auction houses. But the online marketplace for art is still as mottled as a Monet water scene, with vast amounts of art available at various Web sites but a scarcity of big-ticket buyers.

Does art actually sell online? It's long been hard to tell. Now, one big online gallery, Saatchi Online, is offering its first financial clues to the answer -- and a clearer picture of the much-hyped Internet art marketplace and its challenges.

More than a dozen Internet sites, from eBay to Ugallery.com, offer tens of thousands of new artworks. But top collectors like Agnes Gund in New York and curators like Weston Naef of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles largely ignore what's offered on online art sites, preferring to buy directly from auction houses or dealers. Even Christie's International initially struggled last year to persuade collectors to click and bid using its new online venture. (Christie's says its online bidders bought $32.3 million of art over the past year.)"

Though the article focuses on certain sites, to me there is a clear void or a hole in terms as the amount of art actaully being sold on the interenet. For example our site alone at wwww.williamverdult.com has sold hundreds of paintings. So we suggest a much broader look at the on-line art market should be conducted.

Saatchi Online made a splashy entrance into this market over a year ago, when it invited artists to upload and sell their creations on his site, with the site taking no commission fees. With Charles Saatchi, a high-profile British ad executive and art collector, at the helm, the site has been seen by some in the art world as a litmus test for Internet sales.

Now that over 65,000 artists have signed up, Mr. Saatchi says he felt compelled to find out whether the site's artists were achieving any real-world sales. "People were always asking," he says, "and I got tired of saying, 'I don't know.' "

In August, the staff asked a randomly selected 1,000 artists on the site how much art they sell on the site per week; the 41% who responded said their combined sales amounted to $30,000 a week. Last month, his staff posed the same question to a different group of 2,000 artists on the site; about a quarter replied, and their combined weekly sales topped $88,280.

Mr. Saatchi also says the site regularly gets over 50 million user-generated "hits" a day, although the log ticks up every time a visitor opens any new page or image on the site. His in-house team doesn't tally the numbers of "unique" users, but Media Metrix, an independent research firm that tracks online traffic, says the site got 894,000 visitors in August.

Mr. Saatchi says the site's numbers show the Web site is "filling a need." But they also suggest that the site remains a relatively small player in the $6 billion-plus global art market.

One reason: Collectors believe that galleries' support of their artists mean those works are more likely to increase in value over time. Collector Sam Schwartz of Beverly Hills, Calif., who favors the works of Sterling Ruby and Robert Mapplethorpe, says he would "never" consider buying from the Saatchi site. "I buy lots of art by looking at digital files," he says, "but only when I already know the artists' work in a tangible way and when I know their dealers will back them up."

There are other reasons art buyers are reluctant to shop online. Galleries play the role of curator, sifting through reams of art to serve up their picks, while the bounty of choices on the Internet can be daunting. And the anonymity of the Internet purchases may work against it in a field where top collectors often want their peers and museum curators to know which artists and prestigious galleries they like best.

Still, some artists have scored big sales through the Saatchi Web site. One of them is Regine Freise, a set and stage designer from Berlin. Ms. Freise says her realistic portraits had been turned down by at least 40 Berlin galleries before she posted a few on Saatchi's site in May. Within 24 hours, she had sold one, "Teabreak," for around $1,300. She has since sold two other paintings to a Swiss collector, bringing her art sales on the site so far this year to about $5,600, up from "none" the year before. "I'm just amazed," she says.

Jeffrey Neuenschwander, who bought "Teabreak," has bought five paintings via Saatchi Online in the past year. "I still like going to galleries, but online, you can scroll through 500 or 600 artists in an evening and see a large cross-section of work," he says. (He typically asks artists to email him several images of work he's interested in so he can better judge color and scale.)

Other artists say the site's exposure hasn't reliably translated into sales. Changwoo Ryu, a London-based artist, was ranked first in a weekly "Top 10" artist roundup on the site in May but says no buyers have surfaced. Charlene Weisler, an artist in Manhattan, says her Saatchi page led to an invitation to exhibit her street-graffiti photographs in a city apartment that was also on the market, but she says no collectors have bought her work yet via the site.

While many other art-selling Web sites often charge gallery-like commissions, Saatchi Online's nonprofit extension, launched in May 2006, allows artists to sign up free and create tailored home pages on the site featuring their artwork and resumes. Artists are free to field email inquiries from any potential buyers visiting their pages, and they can keep all proceeds from any art sales. Buyers, in turn, can shop around the clock for contemporary art made world-wide.