Online art sales may be catching on

Does art actually sell online? It's long been hard to tell. Now, one big online gallery, Saatchi Online, is offering its first financial clues.

More than a dozen Internet sites, from eBay to Ugallery.com, offer tens of thousands of new artworks. But top collectors largely ignore what's offered on online art sites, preferring to buy directly from auction houses or dealers. Even Christie's International initially struggled last year to persuade collectors to click and bid using its new online venture.

Saatchi Online made a splashy entrance into this market over a year ago, when it invited artists to upload and sell their creations on his site, with the site taking no commission fees. With Charles Saatchi, a high-profile British ad executive and art collector, at the helm, the site has been seen by some in the art world as a litmus test for Internet sales.

Now that more than 65,000 artists have signed up, Saatchi says he felt compelled to find out whether the site's artists were achieving any real-world sales. "People were always asking," he says, "and I got tired of saying, 'I don't know."'

An initial random survey of 1,000 artists on the site (41 percent responding) in August revealed combined sales of $30,000 per week. Recently, a second sampling — this time of 2,000 artists on the site (about 25 percent responding) — showed weekly sales topping $88,000.

Saatchi says the site regularly gets more than 50 million user-generated "hits" a day. Media Metrix, an independent research firm that tracks online traffic, says the site had 894,000 visitors in August.

Saatchi says the site's numbers show the Web site is "filling a need." But they also suggest that the site remains a relatively small player in the $6 billion-plus global art market.

Collector Sam Schwartz of Beverly Hills, Calif., says he would "never" consider buying from the Saatchi site. "I buy lots of art by looking at digital files," he says, "but only when I already know the artists' work in a tangible way and when I know their dealers will back them up."

Galleries play the role of curator, sifting through reams of art to serve up their picks, while the bounty of choices on the Internet can be daunting. And the anonymity of the Internet purchases may work against it in a field where where top collectors often want their peers and museum curators to know which artists and prestigious galleries they like best.