Amazon Now Deals In Art, But Galleries Aren't Threatened
Local record and book shops have been disappearing as the market for music and literature moves online. In the past few years, there's been a growth in sites that sell fine art on the Internet. On Tuesday, Amazon joined that market. But in this case, many brick and mortar galleries aren't seeing the Internet as a threat.
Modernbook Gallery in San Francisco currently has 11 very large eerie photos of a fair-skinned women in a white-lace dress donning its walls. In one photo the woman sits in a chair and feeds milk to a TV. In another, the top half of her head is replaced by a bird cage. The artist's name is Jamie Baldridge. Gallery manager Danny Sanchez says the work was inspired by his childhood and "afternoons reading fairy tales for their dark nature. So you kind of get a little bit of that in his imagery."
It's especially exciting to Sanchez that art collectors are able to look at and buy these creative photos online.
"It'll be another outlet for us to showcase our artists," he said. "And get that wider range of people who are looking for art that would normally not come into our building."
And Sanchez was eager to partner with Amazon. He believes, "they redefined online shopping." Now he thinks, "they have the ability to do that for this new kind of marketplace for art."
The audience for visual art is there says Peter Faricy, vice president of Amazon Marketplace who is overseeing the launch. Faricy said they were actually getting customer requests to put art on Amazon. "We know our customers love fine art and want ways to discover more of it and so this really gives them a way to discover artists far beyond their geography."
The new Amazon fine art site includes galleries in New York, Miami, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Canada. Faricy said Amazon's got more than 150 galleries and dealers signed up with work from more than 4,500 artists. He said they've tried hard to make the site easy to use and appropriate for looking at fine art. "All of the images we're using for the artwork are high definition," he said. "They're all able to be looked at in more detail."
But Amazon isn't the first business to bring fine art online. Back in the late 1990s, Eyestorm set up shop from London. More recently Artsy and ArtSpace have made deals with major museums and galleries to sell works by art stars like Saul Lewitt and Cindy Sherman.
But, David Ross the former director of both the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York thinks Amazon's entrance into the market is a much bigger deal because some hundred million people already shop at the site.
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