Artsy: Buy & Sell Fine Art

I was registered for an auction on Artsy with a client auction house. Next time I will deal with an auction house directly rather than use Artsy as a platform. This is because Artsy does not verify that an auction will actually take place on their platform. I was using their live auction feature and I thought it was very intuitive, however 7 lots from the time I was interested in, the auction mysteriously ended and I was sent an email from Artsy saying I missed out on the item I was attempting to bid on. The problem is, the item never went live on the app! and also the supposed “sale” price was 100 dollars above my highest bid. Very suspicious if you ask me. I emailed support and they would just lie to me and refuse to take any sort of action towards this situation. They continuously told me that the sale did go live, and I simply was “outbid at the last second.” This is ridiculous because that auction didn’t have a timer that was a set countdown, the time would fluxate on bid interest. I think this platform is very shady, and I think they had a technical issue which didn’t sync up to their client site, and they refuse to acknowledge and take accountability for their mistake. It’s crazy I missed out on an item over 100 Euros. Absolutely insane. Don’t use this service if you want to be treated like an adult.

Whenever I learn about a new artist, I go to Artsy to look them up, and I follow them. The list of the artists I follow has essentially become a list of all the artists I’m interested in, saved in one place. Then, the app tells me whenever those artists have new works available on Artsy. I’ve purchased a couple of works through Artsy and it makes connecting with a gallery seamless and simple—it really takes the intimidation factor of collecting out of the equation.

I’m a serious photography collector and Artsy is invaluable to me. It’s the first place I go to begin researching an artist or looking up available work and gallery information. Sending out queries directly from the Artsy App is convenient. Their customer support and auction advisors are attentive and knowledgeable. Because I find Artsy so easy to navigate on my IPad, and its content so rich, I finally cut all ties to Artnet in favor of Artsy. I love the newsletters as well. My only gripe is that upon receiving the notice email of “New works by artists you follow”, it would be convenient to click on the new image that is pictured and have that link directly to that specific page with the new work by that artist. As it is, I’m just routed from my email to the App...I’m on my own from there...not the worst case scenario, as exploring Artsy is always a treat for me.