The AI art adviser in your pocket: How Artsignal is supporting art collectors and auction houses
Artsignal, the AI-assisted service built for auction houses and collectors, is a first-of-its-kind research tool helping art professionals gather market-level insights.
Eighteenth-century landscape paintings aren’t currently in vogue in the art world. Nonetheless, enticed by their beauty and investment potential, some have been building collections of these pieces. Sam Glatman, the co-founder of Artsignal, has an eye for such under-appreciated works.
Artsignal is an AI-assisted research tool, built to support the work of professionals in the sector by generating reports on any work. “At a minimum, we require an image and the name of the artist,” Glatman tells Monocle over coffee in London. All available information (such as the size of the work or its date) is then combined with relevant material sourced online – the kind that you might find using a tool such as ChatGPT – and from a database that includes details about auction sales, exhibitions and more.
The result is a summary that can help auction houses, for example, to decide how much to lend against an artwork or to assess an object’s potential investment trajectory. According to Glatman, Artsignal’s specific method of using the image as a starting point and employing the latest technology to amass extra data makes his service the first in the art world that “really looks at an work in its entirety and makes a judgement on what makes it an interesting or a harder proposition for a potential buyer”.
This has made Artsignal popular among auction houses, galleries and art lenders – and has garnered investment from Christie’s Ventures, part of the revered auctioneer. Though the business currently works with only a few individuals with large collections, Glatman hopes to widen its reach to less established collectors. “If you’re a young person getting into collecting, you might not be able to afford an art adviser,” he says. “But you should still be able to make informed decisions.”
The entry of AI into the art business is understandably a concern for many but Glatman envisages Artsignal as working alongside experts in the sector, rather than against them. “We want to be a tool that art advisers use to give a better service and grow their businesses,” he says. “We would like to be a friend of these market players, not their replacement.”
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Comment
Used smartly, AI doesn’t have to be an enemy to human know-how. Artsignal is proof that using technology to interpret large data sets can support, rather than replace advisers. After all, art can’t be judged by a robot. Leave that to the professionals.
