ABSTRACT
The history of the art market is almost ideally suited for digital approaches and computational analysis. Immense amounts of potential data relevant to the art market exists in auction records, dealers’ stock books, exhibition catalogues, collectors’ inventories, museum object files, and artists’ personal papers. Major collaborative research projects have also helped to open up the archives and translate primary sources into shareable data that can be compiled. The field of art market studies is just beginning to reckon with the new possibilities afforded by these data sets and databases and the potential they offer for transcending the case study. For example, digital and computational methods allow art historians to visualize networks of artists, dealers and collectors; map the circulation of individual art objects; and conduct statistical analyses of patterns in the prices, titles, and exhibition histories of objects.
