Displaying items by tag: Consumers

Convinced that consumers are finally ready to shop online for Picassos and choice Persian rugs in addition to car parts and Pez dispensers, Sotheby’s, the blue-chip auction house, and eBay, the Internet shopping giant, plan to announce Monday that they have formed a partnership to stream Sotheby’s sales worldwide.

Starting this fall, most of Sotheby’s New York auctions will be broadcast live on a new section of eBay’s website. Eventually the auction house expects to extend the partnership, adding online-only sales and streamed auctions taking place anywhere from Hong Kong to Paris to London. The pairing would upend the rarefied world of art and antiques, giving eBay’s 145 million customers instant bidding access to a vast array of what Sotheby’s sells, from fine wines to watercolors by Cézanne.

The online retailer Amazon launched “Amazon Art,” a website that will be used to market works from galleries across the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Canada. The site currently features over 40,000 works from more than 150 galleries and dealers. Offerings range from modest $44 canvases to Norman Rockwell’s Willie Gillis: Package from Home, which carries a price tag of $4.85 million.

Amazon Art’s slogan, “from gallery walls to your walls,” communicates the site’s mission – to make collecting easy and accessible to all. Consumers can search the site by medium, subject, style, size, frame and color. The majority of the galleries involved with Amazon Art are not high end and most of the artworks offered range in price from $100 to $5,000.

Peter Faricy, vice president for the Amazon Marketplace, which is overseeing the art site’s launch, said, “Amazon Art gives galleries a way to bring their passion and expertise about the artists they represent to our millions of customers.”

Prominently situated on the shore of Newport Harbor in the historic Easton’s Point neighborhood, Hunter House (circa 1748) (Fig. 1) exhibits the work of craftsmen practicing in eighteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island. The collection demonstrates the quality and breadth of Rhode Island-made furniture, silver, and pewter, among other decorative and fine arts. The northeast parlor of the house and its interior woodwork, rich in classical details, serves as a backdrop for the collection. Here, locally made wares appear in their appropriate domestic context: within an eighteenth-century structure, its original interiors, and in constellation with the objects used alongside them. Newport’s distinct design tradition is evidenced in the decorative arts and architecture of the house, which reveal the variety of artisans working in close proximity to one another and to Hunter House in the second half of the eighteenth century.