Taking the Art World into the Cloud

Up until the past few years, art and technology have not exactly been wed to each other.

But if Boris Pevzner has his way with Collectrium, the two will at least be really good friends.

Collectrium enables galleries, art fairs, dealers and collectors to move to cloud-based computing.  It’s a mobile app that can instantly identify any work of art from its extensive catalog.

“You point your iphone at a painting and it recognizes it,” he says.  “It brings you information about it – and you can reserve it and even purchase it.”

Pevzner works with 70 art fairs around the world, including The Amory Show in New York and Art Basel in Switzerland.  He’ll be part of a panel discussion on June 15 at Art Basel, one that examines online trends in the art world.

“What’s exciting is how it’s all coming together,” he says.  “We now have 3,500 galleries, 70 art fairs and 100,000 collectors.  It’s grown to be quite large.”

The idea is to connect all of the art world players to all the galleries and art fairs, so that collectors can find the artwork they like in the place where it’s exhibited and sold.  Currently, the market is fragmented – there’s no one place for collectors to go and find what they want.

That’s about to change.  “This is a matching model,” Pevzner says.  “It matches collectors to the art world and connects them to galleries and art fairs.”

Art fairs pay up to $20,000 per event for the service, while galleries, collectors, and artists pay $20 to $50 per month.

It’s no pie-in-the-sky concept, though, and  Pevzner’s certainly no stranger to success.  Bloomberg Businessweek reported last year that he’s already worked through three successful start-ups, including a game company called XFire that he sold for $102 million to Viacom.

For more information on Collectrium, go to http://www.collectrium.com/

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