As technology advanced over time, online platforms emerged and overcame the limitation of time, space, and economy of existing offline markets and slowly began to replace offline markets. With these online platforms capable of rapidly delivering diver...
As technology advanced over time, online platforms emerged and overcame the limitation of time, space, and economy of existing offline markets and slowly began to replace offline markets. With these online platforms capable of rapidly delivering diverse data, its importance has gradually increased and influenced not only in various sectors of society but also in the art market. The contemporary art market has also been growing in the online art market scene, especially in the aftermath of COVID-19, which has accelerated the online art market's expansion and created a market that cannot be ignored. However, research on domestic online art market platforms has not been actively conducted until now.
With this in mind, this research is intended to examine the current status of online platforms in the domestic art market and propose improvements and solutions for revitalization. This thesis will focus on classifying existing online art market platforms in Korea and analyzing them by primary services to infer improvements on how they operate to produce quality data and serve as a virtuous cycle of the art market. Based on the existing art market structure, this thesis will take a closer look into the contemporary art market structure reconstructed to reflect the recent purchase method in the art market and categorize the recently observed art market's online platforms. According to prior research, the art market consists of three stages of creation, distribution, and consumption; however, the limitation still lies in its support from the country, unlike other industries. It's also challenging to explain the nature of the art market and the consumption in such a way as ‘Joint purchase of art' through the newly emerged online art market. In response, this research suggests adding ‘ArtTech' that arose as a new form and an ‘agency' supporting the current art market to the existing art market structure.
This research then will attempt to classify online art market platforms based on online data search and prior research. Since existing online platform classification methods are not suitable for the art market, this thesis proposes the following new classification methods for online art market platforms. The online art market platform can be divided into 1)‘Private platforms' operated by individuals, companies, or organizations based on profit models and 2) ‘Government-support business based platforms' managed by related agencies for government-support projects. Representative cases for each platform were derived by classifying online platforms in the current art market and then analyzing them by significant services.
Based on these online platforms' analysis, it confirmed that although platforms classified as ‘government-support business based platforms' are operated with support from the government, data is not up to date and related content is less active than ‘private platforms.' Since these ‘government-support business based platforms' have not been discussed much in existing research, unlike ‘Private platforms,' this research is designed to derive ways to improve the support-based platforms. In addition to interviews with art market experts in ‘K-ARTMAERKET,' ‘K-artsharing,' and ‘THE ARTRO,' the analysis used the data from the panel discussion held at the Korea Arts Management Service.
Based on these collected data, art market experts have identified how they perceive and what needs to be improved on the current Government-support based platforms, and the conclusions are as follows.
First, online platforms should be improved to address ‘Market polarization' and, secondly, to form ‘Quality data.' Furthermore, although the geographical boundaries are becoming more ambiguous and large brands and consumers in the international art market are in flowing, Korea's competitiveness is low. Due to profound support in the domestic art market, the phenomenon showed quantitative expansion; however, the main focus should be on qualitative improvements rather than quantitative increases. Finally, experts stated that if users do not recognize the platform, even if it has high-quality content, the reason for the platform's existence will disappear, so it should promote the Korean platform itself and raise awareness of the domestic art market. This thesis proposes ways to improve the online art market platform by applying these improvements and the main functions of successful online platforms in other industries to the online art market.
This research is significant because it conducted an overall analysis and identified the current situation when there is currently alack of discussion on the domestic art market's online platform. Besides, it's significance is presented by suggesting improvements by analyzing experts' opinions about the current government-support based platform and its future advancement. However, individual interviews about the platform with a limited number of art market-related experts resulted in the limitation of lacking diverse opinions. It is believed that expanding the scope of future research will help create a better online art market platform for the general public and international crowd.