Compare art auction results databases (Artnet, Artprice, MutualArt) for coverage and access model
domain: auction.art-market.results-databases · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Check Artnet's Price Database (artnet.com/price-database) — roughly 4 million auction results, 188,000+ artists/designers, records back to 1985, subscription-based access
Check Artprice — per artprice.com's own current homepage, a self-reported archival collection of more than 847,700 artists, access to 30 million auction results/indices, and tracking of auctions across roughly 7,200 auction houses worldwide, with records back to 1962, priced from single-report purchases up to broader subscription packages including market indices
Check MutualArt's Price Database (mutualart.com/price-database) — coverage of past results and estimates for 954,000+ artists, gated behind Premium/VIP membership tiers
Confirm none of the three was found to offer a public developer API in this check — all three appear to be subscription/report-based web products, not programmatic data feeds
Pick the database based on the specific artist/period/auction-house coverage needed, since the three differ meaningfully in scope and historical depth
Known gotchas
Honest negative: no public API access was confirmed for Artnet, Artprice, or MutualArt — treat all three as paywalled web/report products for now, not integration-ready data sources
Coverage differs significantly by depth and start date (Artprice back to 1962 vs. Artnet to 1985) — using the wrong one can miss older or newer sales
Vendor-reported coverage figures (artist counts, result counts, auction-house counts) change over time and are self-reported marketing numbers — re-check the vendor's own current site rather than citing a remembered figure, and pricing models (subscription vs. single-report vs. tiered membership) differ enough that cost estimates should not be assumed transferable across the three
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