Why Can’t the Art World Make E-Commerce Work?

Welcome to Arts Radar, a monthly column breaking down key developments in contemporary art and the wider worlds of design, music, cinema and television.

Since the turn of the century, people both inside and outside of the artworld have been ginning up hockey-stick growth graphs, suggesting what will happen when the art market inevitably embraces e-commerce. In the intervening years, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent trying to launch auction sites and gallery platforms. Virtually all of these efforts have since shuttered, stalled or stagnated.

In early September, amid an art market crisis, with global sales sharply down, two of the industry’s biggest legacy players exited major digital projects: First, mega-gallerist David Zwirner sold his e-commerce site Platform to American entrepreneur Jesse Lee, founder of the design and fashion e-commerce site Basic Space.

A few days later, news leaked that Christie’s CEO Bonnie Brennan had decided to shut down the auction house’s digital-art department, launched in 2021 to sell NFTs, then a booming medium. (Going forward, any digital works the house brings to auction will be handled by its contemporary art team).

The art world has long kept e-commerce at arms length, fearful that new technology might disrupt its fragile ecosystem by eroding the personal relationships that have historically driven deals. Then came the Covid-19 outbreak.

In February 2020, when I was running Art Basel, we had the dubious distinction of being the first art fair to cancel due to the pandemic. Shortly thereafter, we launched “online viewing rooms,” i.e. virtual fair booths, which we had been working on for a couple years but fast-tracked when the world shut down. (Yes, I too drew hockey-stick-growth graphs.)

Forced to embrace digital, the dealers slated to show works at our Hong Kong fair, instead uploaded them in late March when the event was originally set to take place — and for the first time dealers even agreed to publicly reveal price ranges for every single artwork, with an average of roughly $130,000 per piece, an unprecedented high for an online art platform.

And we weren’t alone. With IRL art shows rendered impossible overnight, soon the plurality of galleries, auction houses and museums pivoted hard toward digital, creating an avalanche of new content and new platforms — and even an entirely new category of digital art centred on NFTs.

The underlying hypothesis was that selling digital art would attract high-rolling new collectors from the tech world who would convert to also buying physical pieces online, and that embracing e-commerce would give FOMO-ing legacy players a foothold in the booming NFT market.

Zwirner’s Platform, spearheaded by David’s son Lucas and co-founder Bettina Huang, was one of the most ambitious projects launched in that period. “We will never go back to the old way of working,” David Zwirner told The New York Times when the project debuted. “We’ve encountered a much larger art world than we thought existed. If it proves to be a robust primary market, the sky’s the limit.”

Going live in May 2021, and structured as a freestanding start-up able to work with any artist, Platform dropped 100 pieces once a month, priced between $2,500 and $50,000, only taking a 20 percent cut of sales, far below the industry’s standard 50-50 split.

About a year later, Christie’s launched its NFT initiative, “Christie’s 3.0,” riding the momentum from the auction house’s March 2021 sale of Beeple’s “Everydays” NFT for an earth-shattering $69.3 million. “With this brand-driven forum, Christie’s aims to recognise and bring young emerging artists to an international and digitally savvy market,” Christie’s said about its new digital art department at the time.

Suffice to say, hockey-stick growth has not materialised. Quite the opposite. The post-pandemic years have been tough for art’s digital sales platforms, especially in the context of a contracting market. The NFT art trend collapsed so spectacularly that the acronym itself is now shunned in favour of “digital art on chain.” In the legacy art market, data from the 2025 Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report indicated that the portion of UHNWIs buying art online fell from 19 percent in 2021 to 6 percent in 2023. Perhaps not even a global pandemic was enough to trigger the digitalisation of the artworld some had thought inevitable.

Ironically enough, the news that Christie’s was shuttering its digital arts department was broken by Matt Medved, co-founder of the NFT Now platform, which did splashy Art Basel Miami Beach and Frieze Seoul events with Christie’s before rebranding itself as Now Media. “Obviously the digital art market is not in the same place as when Christie’s 3.0 launched,” says Medved. “It was not news that I enjoyed breaking. During the Web3 boom, the art gallery and the casino were in the same building. Now that they’re not, most of the crowds have followed the casino — and now those speculators and gamblers are off investing in memecoins.”

To those who had been following Zwirner’s digital initiatives, Platform’s sale was more surprising. Yes, Platform had reportedly gone through layoffs in 2023. But after launching as a venue for less-pricey unique art, Platform had pivoted into artist merchandise, and lower-priced multiples, from Zwirner stars such as Katherine Bernhardt, Josh Smith, Raymond Pettibon, Rose Wylie and R. Crumb.

As outgoing Platform CEO Huang points out, e-commerce is generally a difficult business. (Just look at Farfetch, Matches and Ssense.) But the art world poses unique problems. “Good artworks try to present new ideas, so they don’t fit neatly into algorithmic marketing,” Huang says. On the supply side, galleries wanting to control who gets to buy work (because the value of an artist’s market can be shaped by who owns the pieces they create) have long resisted the “buy now” function present on most successful e-commerce sites. On the demand side, “collectors expect it to be straightforward, because buying everything else online is so streamlined,” Huang points out. “People are no longer as willing to jump through hoops to buy art.”

At a much more fundamental level, there’s the question of whether legacy power players with lots to lose and high operational costs are the right people to launch digital initiatives. Maybe it never made sense for 259-year-old Christie’s, with its byzantine hierarchies and dozens of offices worldwide, to enter a NFT market driven by Discord channels, where artworks on average were being held for weeks rather than years.

“Christies had the most advanced platform from a legacy player, but it’s tough for a company that big to keep up with the fast-moving trends,” observes Medved. “Plus, it was seen as a way to attract crypto-native wealth toward collecting paintings and sculpture on the legacy side. That didn’t play out as much as expected.”

The reality is that you don’t need e-commerce to sell a $250,000 painting — the number of potential buyers is too small; the deals too personality-driven. Digital’s sweet spot is further down the pyramid, where dealers must sell thousands of works to hundreds of collectors to make it worthwhile.

Zwirner and his fellow investors reportedly put $10 million into Platform. In the artworld, that’s a lot of money — enough to poach a star artist. But in the tech start-up world, where the “first grow, then monetise” mindset entails huge burn rates, it’s bare bones.

How does Basic Space’s Jesse Lee plan to make it work? “We’ll probably move the artist collabs to the Basic Space site, and we want to move the Basic Space psychographic toward art,” Lee says. “These are real people that we already sell to, and I can see many of them graduating from buying fashion to buying art.” (Lee is keeping Huang and the Zwirners on-board as advisors to ensure quality control.)

Recognising that the market’s relatively small size demands high audience engagement to succeed, Lee — who also bought the Design Miami fair franchise in 2023 — will go heavily hybrid on the promotional front. “We’re going to over-index on events, because we see that online activity jumps and more sales happen whenever we do things IRL,” Lee says. “We need to create compelling experiences with art, so we can bring new kids into the club. But we also need galleries to adapt. To a smart, cool 25-year-old with money to spend, a sales platform with prices missing just seems crazy.”

Here’s the bottom line: NFTs are dead. E-commerce is hard. E-commerce for art is even harder. Legacy players should stay out of the start-up game. Digital will never rule the art market’s upper tier. But there’s still scope for selling art merch, multiples and five-figure emerging artists online.

Nick Cave, AI Convert?

Ranked among rock’s best writers, Aussie legend Nick Cave’s has penned particularly entertaining eviscerations of AI, calling the technology’s use in music “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human” and parcel to the “erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself.” But then came a video, created in secret by close Cave collaborator Andrew Dominik, for Cave’s 1985 track “Tupelo,” starring an AI Elvis and sprung on the singer for the piece’s 40th anniversary. “As I watched Andrew’s surreal little film, I felt my view of AI as an artistic device soften,” Cave posted to his blog’s fervent 70,000 readers, noting that Dominik’s AI Elvis “had an uncanny quality, as if he had been raised from the dead.” In other August AI-meets-music news, Xania Monet, a virtual front for songwriter Telisha Jones, entered the Billboard Charts, broke 10 million downloads and signed a $3 million recording deal.

The Wizard of Vegas

While The Sphere in Las Vegas is best known for birthing a new kind of concert experience by amping up popular musical acts ranging from U2 to the Grateful Dead to the Backstreet Boys with immersive technology, lately it has been printing money with a very different form of content: a much shorter, colourised, fast-paced, immersive rendering of the original 1939 “Wizard of Oz” film. From a commercial standpoint, the yellow brick road seems paved with gold: Sphere Entertainment Co. (SPHR) stock rose 50 percent over the last month based on “Wizard” tickets sales. Cinema critics are less enthusiastic; Alissa Wilkinson of The New York Times noted with alarm: “It suggests that in the future, every artist’s choices could be reversed, altered or ripped to shreds, then presented by their corporate owners as if they’re essentially the original, just zhuzhed up a bit for a new century.”

What Else I’m Reading:

• AI startup Anthropic Agrees to Pay $1.5 Billion to Settle Book Piracy Lawsuit [The Guardian]
• LimeWire, the Former File-Sharing Service, Is Buying Fyre Festival Brand [The New York Times]
• AI Won’t Replace Artists — It Will Make Them Unstoppable: Lyor Cohen [Billboard]
• Creator of Charli XCX Apple dance settles Roblox lawsuit [BBC]
• Earl Sweatshirt Hangs With His Imposter in New “Crisco” Video: Watch [Pitchfork]

Having led Art Basel from 2007 to 2022, Marc Spiegler now works on a portfolio of cultural-strategy projects. He is President of the Board of Directors of Superblue, works with the Luma Foundation, and serves on the boards of the ArtTech and ArtExplora foundations. In addition to consulting for companies such as Prada Group, and Sanlorenzo, and cultural projects such as the forthcoming Digital Art Museum in Hamburg and Transmoderna, Spiegler has for a decade served as a Visiting Professor in cultural management at Università Bocconi in Milan and this year launched the Art Market Minds Academy