Adam Fields, the founder of ARTA, announced a $3m round of fundraising and the opening of an office in London today. The funds will allow ARTA to expand internationally:

The seed round of financing is drawn in part from additional investments from several previous ARTAinvestors, such as art-world heavyweights Sotheby’s and David Zwirner and venture capital firms including Notation Capital, and in part from a consortium of new Chinese and European investors to help support international expansion.

“What ARTA has developed is a game-changer for logistics in the art world. They have given us a tremendous advantage by allowing us to streamline our operations; something that is incredibly important in a market that is constantly evolving,” said David Zwirner. “ARTA‘s transparent model is also very rare in the startup arena, something that my gallery values and appreciates.”

In addition to focusing on international growth, ARTA has used the additional funding to hire six new employees, including new Heads of Marketing and Engineering, and is preparing to launch partnerships with ArtBase and Phillips in September. Through an API integration, clients of ArtBase, an inventory management system used by hundreds of galleries and museums, and Phillips can easily send inventory information to ARTA and receive shipping quotes with a single click of a button. Additional integrations, set to launch later this year, are also in development, which the goal of creating more efficiencies and scale for both sellers and shipping companies.

Georgina Adam gets to the heart of the problems created by the volcanic ash floating over Northern Europe for the art market. Some dealers and auction houses reported slow traffic and reduced participation from the travel restrictions. But the real problem is the way art handling has been halted:

According to the leading art shippers Gander and White, “business ground to a halt”. Even with the resumption of flights, things will take a long time to get back to normal; the firm’s managing director Oliver Howell told me: “All the flights are full and the airlines are not accepting freight until further notice. I don’t see any change soon; the backlog is huge.” He said he knew of dealers who had lost sales because they could not get works of art to prospective clients.

The Art Market: Fall-Out from the Volcano (Financial Times)

The New York Times explained the new security rules for flying art as cargo that is going to cause headaches for galleries and collectors. Museums have the shipment sizes, planning, logistics and time horizons to take advantage of a new government program to have art inspected in the secure premises of a museum environment. But galleries and private collectors won’t have that luxury.

The Times quotes John McCollum, of Stebich Ridder International, an art-shipping company, explaining that another complication the art world would encounter involved the frequent use of anonymous parties in transactions:

“You’re a dealer in San Francisco and you’re trying to sell a piece that happens to be in a gallery in New York, and the buyer is in Paris, but the guy in New York, for all kinds of reasons, doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s the one selling the piece,” Mr. McCollum said. Because the federal government requires airlines to ensure that cargo comes only from known shippers — those who have filled out paperwork or been identified in other ways as being legitimate — such hidden parties in art deals will have a much more difficult time remaining hidden. Continue Reading