Marketplace talks to dealer Chip Tom who says his gallery is doing a lot of business online for very valuable works:

Tom is a partner and art curator at Heather James Fine Art. The gallery sells big names, like Monet and Picasso.

TOM: Amazingly, we do between 30-40 percent of our business on the Internet. We don’t meet them. We don’t even necessarily speak to them on the phone. It’s all through e-mails.

TYLER: People are spending upwards of tens of thousands of dollars on stuff that they’ve never actually seen or touched?

TOM: Hundreds of thousands of dollars per piece on things they’ve never seen or touched.

Art World Finds a New Market Online (Marketplace/American Pubic Radio)