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The senses are an important part of any purchase.  Yet, when you buy something in cyberspace, you can't touch or feel it, or see it in person, like you would in a store.  Unless you are buying something that you have already experienced holding, like an iPod, it's hard to assess the subtleties like color and texture.  Yet, "fashion," which is almost always has a touch and feel aspect about it, is a major category of eBay sales (Skates 7).  With art, its tangible nature is key; the buyer needs a sense of what is being offered, which in some part I think explains the popularity of the preview / inspection for any major auction.  But the remarkable thing is that despite the difficulty in assessing the tangible nature of artwork online, the fact is that the internet is still is a significant means of buying and selling in the art market.  I think one can say that the telephone bidder from China or Russia who doesn't, for example, attend the inspection of a Warhol or Hirst piece being auctioned off, is really not much different than the internet buyer bidding on the same item.  While it may not replace the senses involved in viewing something in person, a printed or online catalogue seems to work just fine – at least for those in the art world willing to buy without inspection.  If the auction houses can sell multi-million dollar pieces of art sight unseen (or only seen in a catalogue,) then the internet should not be handicapped by an inability of the buyer to fully assess the tangible aspects of a piece of art.  This is why I believe that the more advanced a web site is in terms of presenting artwork, for example, videos, high pixel digital images from different angles, etc., the less important an in-person inspection is for the buyer.  Artnet's web site, with its multiple photos from different angles and zoom feature, is a good example of how the buyer can ascertain the tangible aspects of art being sold online without seeing it in person.

VI.  Technology in Reverse - Online Auction

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Sites Go Brick and Mortar:

In what is probably the best indication that the electronic art market will probably never replace the traditional means of transacting art, both Artnet and Saffronart have recently taken physical exhibition spaces.  As was written in Art Radar, "this paradox reminds us that the marketing of art is still much more about human relationships than the pixels of a pretty picture."  While I don't think this signals that the Internet model of buying and selling art will decline, it does reflect that a live presence in the art market is always a good thing.   A few months ago, The New York Times wrote that there will always be art buyers who still need a "little live reassurance from human beings that what they are seeing and reading about on the screen is what it appears to be" (Kennedy 3).  

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