Joining the board of ARTBnk are Michael Moses (left) and Asher Edelman.
Veteran art financier Asher Edelman and retired academic Michael Moses are joining the board of ARTBnk, the art-valuation company that relies on artificial intelligence.
Edelman, who is the CEO and founder of ArtAssure, Edelman Arts and the financing company Artemus, will also be ARTBnk’s executive chairman.
“The art industry must embrace sound technology in order to modernise and increase transparency,” said Edelman. “After incorporating ARTBnk’s platform into my financing businesses, I know first-hand the impact this company, and its ability to produce quality art valuation in real time, will have on decision makers.”
Edelman became an art collector while working as an investment banker (he actually inspired the writers of the movie Wall Street to make Gordon Gecko an art collector). He founded Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1990. Edelman began dealing in art in 1995, and founded art finance company, ArtAssure, in 2009.
Founded an art finance company
“Asher’s accomplishments and experience in the finance and art industries are unrivalled,” said Jamie LaFleur, ARTBnk founder. “And we are excited to have him join our team at an integral time for our company.”
The company is planning to issue an improved version – ARTBnk 2.0 – of its valuation tool early in 2020. It offers individual valuations and a subscription product.
Moses, a retired NYU Stern School of Business Professor, co-created the Sotheby’s Mei Moses Art Indices (the best-known way of tracking the value of art). He has been working with ARTBnk as a senior adviser and as its principal data scientist since October 2019.
‘Historical financial performance’
“Michael’s work, with partner Jiaping Mei, has long represented the gold standard in evaluating the art market’s financial performance through the analysis of repeat sales auction data,” said Ethan Vallarino CEO of ARTBnk. “With this partnership, ARTBnk will be able to combine recent artist historical financial performance over time with our automated ‘comparables’ analysis to allow for more precise valuations of individual works of art. This information will also serve as the basis for a patent pending methodology to determine relative artist investment potential.”
ARTBnk is also buying all the intellectual property from Moses and Jiaping Mei’s Art Market Consultancy. “We’ve been working to incorporate Michael and Jiaping’s updated artist performance analysis into our next release, and the results are very promising,” said LaFleur. “We are now able to assess similar works and assign accurate and unbiased current market value determinations to works that do not, individually, have reliable prior auction sales records.”
LaFleur adds: “We think it’s important to provide users with a bigger picture of the art market as a whole, while adding depth and context to valuations of individual works of art.”
