The London- and Prague-based online art trading platform Artstaq (Automated Rating and Trading Standard for Art Quotation) will launch its full website this month. Founded in 2015 and described as the art world’s answer to Nasdaq, the online stock exchange platform, Artstaq hopes to bring transparency to the art market by providing free data on the value and sale of works of art.
Artstaq’s three main services will be real-time trading of art as an asset class, selling and valuing works. The Czech start-up company is in the process of indexing the entire global art market (around 20% will be completed by the time the website launches) using a combination of captured and big data, as well as expert opinions from the art world, to create algorithms that automatically estimate the market value of works of art. In the next few months the company—which also has an innovation centre in Dubai—will develop the capacity to buy and sell shares in works in the same way that stocks are traded on the exchange.
Artstaq will also be working with OneProve, a new artificial intelligence technology that takes digital imprints of the material structure of works to ensure their authenticity and to prevent the sale of fakes.
“With the information that Artstaq provides, anyone—even those who don’t know anything about the art world— will be able to trade in art,” says Petr Václavek, the company’s vice president of global marketing and communications.