An App That Pushes Aside the Art World Curtain

Featured on nytimes.com

The process of buying and selling art, particularly contemporary works, has a reputation for opacity, but a new mobile app that promises to instantly provide price data could contribute to the opening up of the market.

The free app, called Magnus, uses digital-recognition technology similar to that of Shazam, which “hears” music to provide song titles, and Vivino, which reads wine labels and reveals ratings and restaurant markups.

The user takes a photo of an artwork with a mobile device. Within seconds, Magnus provides the name of the artist, gallery price, past dealer and auction prices of other works, and the artist’s exhibition history. The image can be shared via text, email, Instagram, Facebook and other social media, and saved in the user’s digital collection.

“A lot of people are left out of the market who have the potential to buy,” said Magnus Resch, a New York entrepreneur who created the app, which was released on Friday for Apple mobile devices after three years of development. “The No. 1 reason for this is the lack of transparency.”

Galleries can be intimidating environments, dealers reluctant to divulge prices except to serious buyers, and even the seeming transparency of auctions can create misleading notions of value through the momentary whims of bidders.

“If you want to buy a product, you need to know the price and make comparisons,” Mr. Resch said. “There is virtually no data on gallery prices, and if you want information on the auction market, you have to pay for it.”

Mr. Resch, 31, is the author of the 2014 book “Management of Art Galleries.” He was formerly based in Berlin and Hong Kong, where he co-founded Larry’s List, an international database of contemporary art collectors, which he no longer manages.

“It isn’t an app built for billionaires, but for everyone interested in art,” Mr. Resch said. “This isn’t a selling platform. Our aim is to provide access to the art market and democratize it and hopefully enlarge it.”

Magnus now has more than eight million gallery and auction prices compiled worldwide since 2013 by more than 200 of the app’s preliminary “trusted users.” Mr. Resch declined to specify how many of these are “primary” market prices — the first time a work has been sold — and how many are “secondary” resales at auction, for which data is available at subscription websites like artnet.com and artprice.com.

Mr. Resch said prices given by a gallery had to be corroborated by other trusted users before being added to the database. The app also includes an interactive map with information on gallery openings and shows, as well as museum exhibitions.

To see whether Magnus works as advertised, Lisa Schiff, a New York art adviser, took a smartphone loaded with the app to the Matthew Marks and Marianne Boesky galleries in Chelsea this week.

Click here to read the full article.