UNTITLED, ART fair closed its inaugural online edition this past Sunday, the first VR art fair of its kind to come to the art market. Led by founder Jeffrey Lawson and director Manuela Mozo, the international fair, which stages live annual events in Miami and San Francisco, hosted 40 vendors from across the United States, South America, and Europe via the online platform from June 20 to August 9.

Executed in collaboration with Danish startup Artland, Untitled’s online fair was shaped by digital software and e-commerce features that allowed viewers to explore a simulation of traditional booth installations. The virtual setup enabled collectors to purchase works by means of a buy-now selling platform as well as negotiate through the fair’s digital chat feature.

According to fair representatives, on the event’s public opening day, one in ten users engaged a transactional feature on the platform, among which are Buy Now and Make an Offer functions, as well as the dealer’s chat bot, which supports sale negotiations and client inquiries. Untitled and Artland representatives claim the statistic is higher than the industry standard for e-commerce engagement. Fair representatives note that this key indicator demonstrates the scalability of the digital platform and is critical to informing improvements for the fall edition. “This engagement underscores our belief that collectors will make purchases online when they see something they love in an engaging context, and that the ability to converse in real time is something that was sorely missed by collectors as fairs went virtual,” said Lawson.

“We have developed cutting-edge technology that allows us to meaningfully tap into new audiences and to present an authentic, high-level experience that was not possible before,” Lawson continued. On the fair’s opening day, the platform saw high engagement among early participants and VIP users, but experienced technical glitches early on. “We expected a few hiccups as we opened our virtual reality doors to the world,” confirmed Lawson, noting that the 24-7 virtual buying experience through the platform and app are in their inaugural phases and still developing. “It will only get more sophisticated, refined, and interactive as we continue to build on and improve the technology with each iteration of our online fairs,” said Lawson.

As international and regional fairs continue to roll out new digital formats, dealers are adapting as well. “Of course, a physical experience is always great, as it gives you personal contact and interactions, but we think that a mix of both is the future for the art world,” said Max and Julia Voloshyn, owners of Voloshyn Gallery, in a statement regarding the new format. In other online fair iterations, vendors have reported digital presentations can limit the ability to accurately represent the works on offer. In a statement on the VR experience in UNTITLED, Evan Reiser, associate director of Bortolami Gallery, noted the platform provided collectors “the opportunity to consider each work in three-dimensional space, in true scale, and in context to one another.”

Despite the seasonal lag, UNTITLED garnered transactions among both established and emerging dealers. Frederik Schampers, director at Galeria Nara Roesler, reported the sale of two large Vik Muniz works on the fair’s opening day, with asking prices around $60,000. Bortolami Gallery confirmed that it had placed artwork by each of the artists on view in their booth, from small framed drawings to large paintings. Highlights from the showcase included Rebecca Morris’s Untitled (#07-20) from 2020 that had an asking price of $60,000 and Ivan Morley’s thread and ink on canvas offered at a price of $75,000. Elsewhere, the fair’s Charitable Artist Edition, co-produced in an edition of 50 by Artspace & Phaidon, with proceeds benefiting the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), sold out. Portland-based Upfor gallery sold three editions by Los Angeles–based multimedia contemporary artist April Bey, whose works were priced between $3,500 to $25,000.

New York’s Charles Moffett gallery sold six works by another Los Angeles–based media artist, Bari Ziperstein, at prices between $2,500 and $3,000. Los Angeles contemporary gallery Gavlak sold a 2020 abstract work on paper by Andrew Brischler titled BREATHE IN BREATHE OUT (Mahogany/Yellow), for $6,300, with negotiations pending for works by Candida Alvarez and Nancy Lorenz. “As a younger experimental gallery, it was great that UNTITLED, ART Online provided us with this virtual platform,” said Michael Fleming, cofounder of Queens contemporary gallery Selenas Mountain, “especially at a time when presenting and selling artwork is so challenging due to the pandemic.” The gallery presented works by two of its emerging contemporary artists, Chicago-based Yvette Mayorga and New York–based Dana Robinson, at prices between $1,400 and $7,500. By fair’s end, the dealer had placed four mixed-media works by Dana Robinson with buyers.

Several months after announcing the closure of his art collection, German scientist and art collector Thomas Olbricht is set to sell approximately 500 works from his holdings this September at Cologne-based auction house Van Ham.

Tagged “From a Universal Collector – The Olbricht Collection,” the auction will offer between 150 and 200 works of modern and contemporary art, with leading lots by blue-chip artists like Cindy Sherman and George Condo. The top lot coming up in the Cologne auction from the chemist’s holdings is George Condo’s 2005 painting Screaming Couple, which carries a pre-sale estimate of €300,000–€500,00 ($354,600–$591,000). A comparable work featuring the same screaming protagonist couple, currently held in a private collection, was shown at a traveling Condo survey at the opened at New York’s New Museum in 2011 and marked the beginning of his market’s ascent.

Other highlights from the sale include a painting by the German artist Daniel Richter, valued at €150,000–€350,000 ($177,000–$413,700), and an early Cindy Sherman photograph that comes with a high estimate of €120,000 ($141,830).

Olbricht, who has one of the top private art collections in Germany, opened his private museum and foundation nearly a decade ago, in 2011, as public institutions began clamoring for loans from his collection. In total, his museum, titled ‘me Collectors Room Berlin,’ held 21 exhibitions featuring works by Gerhard Richter, William Eggleston, Emil Nolde, Imi Knoebel, Joseph Beuys, and Albrecht Dürer, among others. Olbricht has garnered a reputation for his eclectic tastes spanning centuries. He has stated his particular interest in memento mori and vanitas works.

The collector has also placed special emphasis on Wunderkammern, or 16th-century European “cabinets of curiosities.” The one he owns places objects dating from the Renaissance and Baroque periods alongside fauna and other organic matter. Among the highlights of Olbricht’s Wunderkammern are a brass death hourglass made around 1620 that was formerly owned by Yves Saint Laurent.

Olbricht began collecting contemporary art in the 1980s and has ranked on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list 12 times. The first work Olbricht bought was a 1968 painting by Sigmar Polke, followed by a Cindy Sherman photograph purchased in 1996.

In recent years, Phillips has placed an emphasis on emerging artists, with its “New Now” series devoted to early and mid-career contemporary names having become central in the market sphere. Now, the auction house is unveiling a new digital product that will allow users to monitor up-and-comers without having to ever consult its auction results.

Working in collaboration with computer scientist and scholar, Tomasz Imielinski, Phillips has developed Articker, a proprietary data tool that tracks and scores artists based on their presence in the media. In an unusual touch for an auction house, prices are not the main point of interest on the tool. Instead, the platform seeks to provide collectors and Phillips specialists with an algorithmic representation of the industry’s top trending artists and their global networks. The product’s launch comes as houses beef up their investments in technology to continue holding a foothold in the global online marketplace, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The open-source intelligence tool, which was developed in 2014, has aggregated data on around 150,000 artists, crawling an estimated 5,000 articles from 16,000 news online sources daily for information about who is being watched most closely right now. According to Konrad Imielinski, a data scientist who acted as the tool’s co-developer, the point of Articker is to show each artist’s “slice of the media pie.” For now, Articker is mainly being used internally by employees at Phillips, but a modified version is being made available to the auction house’s clients.

In an interview, Jean-Paul Engelen, Phillips’s Co-Head of 20th Century and Contemporary Art and Global Chairman, said that the database offers real-time analysis of which artists are holding the most sway in the cultural sector. “Typically, one has to wait until an auction has taken place to know about the price data on the secondary market for any given artist,” Engelen said. But, with Articker, now Phillips executives have the ability to track the rise of in-demand emerging artists, while also finding new ones to watch before their work enters the primary market. “In such a relatively static market with infrequent and opaque pricing data, Articker creates an alternative valuation system for artists,” Engelen continued.

“To our knowledge, it is the largest repository of non-price online data about artists,” Imielinski said in an interview. According to Engelen, the tool is designed to provide insights into an artist’s value beyond the limited scope of public auction records.

On the product, artists are ranked according to the amount of press they generate. The painter Amoako Boafo, for example, has recently become a market sensation, and Articker shows that collectors’ fervor is coinciding with the amount of headlines focused on him. A recent collaboration with Dior raised Boafo’s media profile, thanks to features that appeared in Vogue and other outlets; this, in turn, resulted in an overall rise in his Articker score. According to Articker, Boafo—who has seen a 152 percent increase in his media share in the past three months—is outpacing his peers by a long shot.

Picasso, who is perhaps the leading global artist brand worldwide, comprises 2 percent of the global media share in the database. Big-name artists like Marina Ambramović and Gerhard Richter trend highly on Articker’s Insights page, which is not surprising—both artists have long dominated the press and, to a certain degree, the market. But Articker’s primary value is in allowing users to foresee which artists are soon to have a moment.

“If a young artist has an incredible M.F.A. exhibition, we now have a robust view on the media attention they are getting well before they even have gallery representation,” Engelen said. Accordingly, the developers of Articker have paid special attention to artists coming out of the Yale School of Art and other top art schools in the United States.

Pressure to deliver the next big thing to the market drives the tool’s imperative. For Phillips executives, the intelligence tool helps alleviate the burden of having to employ specialists to source cutting-edge contemporary talent on a global scale, while also enabling employees at the house to keep tabs on those with recently established secondary markets.

As the online marketplace expands, international art firms are investing in digital initiatives to serve both internal and client needs. “Since becoming CEO of Phillips in July 2014, I’ve prioritized a digital first strategy for the company,” said Edward Dolman, Phillips CEO, in a statement, adding that Articker is meant to “democratize” access to information on artists. “I see it as a critical development for our increasingly digital world, particularly in our current climate.”

The final typescript for Truman Capote’s famed 1958 Breakfast at Tiffany’s found a winning buyer for £377,000 ($485,500) in a Sotheby’s Books and Manuscripts auction in London on Tuesday. The edition achieved more than double its presale estimate of £120,000–£180,000 to lead the $1.8 million auction.

Featuring the author’s more than 150 edits, the 84-page document, first submitted to Random House in May 1958, was last sold at Boston’s RR auction in April 2013 for $306,667; here, it garnered 16 bids total. According to the Sotheby’s description of the lot, this version is the first to name the iconic protagonist Holly Golightly, who until the final draft was known as Connie Gustafson. Few literary manuscripts of the same caliber attributed to Capote remain in private hands. Another draft resides in the writer’s archive at the Library of Congress.

“The character of Holly Golightly is of course the heart of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the most striking change made by Capote in this draft relates to her,” said Dr. Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s specialist in books and manuscripts, in a statement following the sale. “Undoubtedly one of the great names of modern comedy, it is as magnificently implausible as its owner and connects to her character in a number of ways: ‘Golightly’ reflects the lightness with which she treats the world, her lack of attachment to place, and perhaps hints at promiscuity; whilst ‘Holly’ will prickle if you get too close.”

Sotheby’s catalogue entry includes Capote’s explanation of his fleeting protagonist. “She was such a symbol of all these girls who come to New York and spin in the sun for a moment like May flies and then disappear,” said Capote in a Playboy interview. “I wanted to rescue one girl from that anonymity and preserve her for prosperity.”

According to a new report published by a London art market analytics firm Pi-eX, the top three public auction houses—Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips—saw a 79 percent year-over-year drop in revenue during the second quarter of 2020. Whereas in 2019 the houses brought in $4.4 billion during the second quarter, this year they saw $0.9 billion during the same period. The dramatic decrease is more significant than the one that followed the 2008 financial crisis, when auction revenue fell from $4.8 billion in Q2 2008 to $1.6 billion in Q2 2009.

Pi-eX previously found that sale totals from the same auction houses had fallen 40 percent during the first quarter of 2020. In the quarter that followed, the houses staged hundreds of auctions in digital, live, and hybrid formats, with four live-streamed evening sales that each drew in excess of 150,000 viewers and together achieved a combined total of $1 billion between June 29 and July 28. The houses’ French outposts reportedly experienced the lowest drop in year-over-year revenue, falling 27 percent with live programming opening back up at the end of May.

According to Pi-eX, from August 2019 to July 2020, auction houses made $7.8 billion through sales—a number not even close to the $11.1 billion made during the same period between 2018 and 2019. The 2020 figure is the third-lowest total since 2009’s figure ($5.5 billion), and the second-lowest in the last decade, coming in just above the 2010 total of $7.3 billion. ArtTactic’s 2020 global auction report released in June said that, in comparison to the first half of 2019, the results of evening sales of Impressionist, modern, postwar, and contemporary art across New York, Hong Kong and London fell 57.3 percent in the first half of 2020.

Auction houses have moved online primarily out of necessity. According to the Pi-eX report, in Q2 2020, 84 percent of auctions arranged were online during the first two quarters of 2020, as opposed to 20 percent for that period in 2019. Sotheby’s alone said that, in the first seven months of 2020, its online sales results jumped a staggering 540 percent, posting a total in excess of $285 million. While revenue from online sales showed a robust 550% increase in Q2 2020’s result of $286 million versus $44 million in 2019, these digital channels do not come close to matching revenue brought in through the marquee live auctions, where more expensive works hit the block. The report shows that more than half of the second quarter’s auctions were held in the month of June and together generated 85% of the second quarter revenue. At the end of June, for example, Sotheby’s staged modern and contemporary art evening sale that achieved $363 million in results.

“The biggest takeaway for Q2 is that these live marquee sales are essential to the auction business and that so far, online auctions, which were the majority of auctions in Q2 2020, were not able to generate the level of revenue live auctions generate,” said Christine Bourron, CEO of Pi-eX. Due to a major shift in the auction calendar that saw several marquee sales pushed to July, the revenue posted in the third quarter will provide a more accurate picture of whether the market is recovering from the coronavirus pandemic, according to Bourron.

No in-person sales were held at the top three houses in April because of various restrictions. Then, in June, they returned, and revenues surged. But this did not make up for the loss of revenue earlier in the quarter, even though the volume of online sales across the houses has increased during the pandemic. In May 2020, across the three houses, $82 million worth of art was traded online—a number that came just shy of the selling price of the season’s top lot, a Francis Bacon triptych that sold at Sotheby’s for $85 million. (Most online sales brought in an average total between $1 million and $5 million)

In a typical season, the top ten lots at auction account for between 40 percent and 50 percent of the evening sale’s total figure. Without those lots hitting the block, the houses suffered. After a mass expansion of their online platforms, auction houses tested how high collectors were willing to bid through digital channels in the live evening sales. In its June modern and contemporary sale, held via livestream, Sotheby’s received its highest historic online bid for the monumental Bacon painting of $73.1 million from a client in China.

Accordingly, the average lot price has dropped significantly, from $130,000 in the first two quarters in 2019 to $50,000 for that period in 2020. The figure comes close to the one for 2009, the year after the recession began, but there is one key difference: the number of lots consigned. This year so far, there have been 20,000 lots consigned; in 2009, during the second quarter there were 50,000. Officials at the houses have experienced difficulty in getting collectors to consign works during a pandemic. Phillips CEO Edward Dolman said in a post-sale press conference in July that it was a challenge to convince collectors to sell high-caliber works in a time of economic fragility.