Auctions from the famous New York auction house Sotheby’s are set to be streamed live on eBay, the company has announced. The first auction of this type will have a New York theme with a range of Yankee Stadium memorabilia for sale and will take place on 1st April. Lots include the giant letters from the New York baseball stadium that are expected to fetch up to $600,000.
At the moment, evening sales of the high-value artworks and other specialist items sold by the auction house will not be included on the site.
Partnership
The auctions will be streamed via a new eBay platform called ebay.com/sothebys and the first auction will also include photographs and baseball memorabilia from famous player Reggie Jackson, who won the World Series five times.
Josh Pullan, senior vice president and director of e-commerce at Sotheby’s said that the partnership was designed to leveraging the audience of eBay as well as its ability to target their audience and get them to participate in an auction at Sotheby’s.
Another notable lot that will be available is Andy Warhol’s first studio lease, estimated to sell for between $8,000 and $12,000. The description of the item reads ‘Official City of New York Department Real Estate lease, printed on blue paper, annotated and signed by Andy Warhol and Don Schrader as witness.’
Notable lots
The highest estimate was for item number 17 – Frederic Auguste Bartholdi’s clay design model for the Statue of Liberty, which he presented for approval and which is expected to sell for as much as $1.2 million.
Both Sotheby’s and major rival Christie’s already hold online art sales but the link with eBay will allow the auction house to bring their inventory to a new audience of potential 155 million active users all around the world.
Online sales of both art and antiques reached around the $3.5 billion mark in 2014, equivalent to 6% of global sales based on a report commissioned by the Netherlands-based European Fine Art Foundation. The majority of the sales that were conducted online were between the $1,000 and $50,000 mark.
And while the partnership is between eBay and the New York based company, the auctions will be open to anyone around the world. The majority of auctions will be streamed via the website, with the exception of the high-priced sales of modern, contemporary and Impressionist art.
Increases
Sotheby’s has already seen an increase of around 25% in online bidding in 2014 compared with 2013 and in the auction of Picasso Ceramics, around 75% of the lots were bid on over the internet.
The online version of their auctions is designed to emulate the auction catalogue in a digital format and to recreate the experience of seeing art in a museum before taking the bidders to the live auction where they can bid in real time, according to the company.
