Laws are often disregarded and people move freely, with a dark sense of impunity in the anarchic web. Combining all this with the art system is no easy feat. This is gradually being discovered by galleries but, above all, by auction houses that are experiencing it online on a daily basis. The freedom of bidding, albeit screened by a documented pre-registration, exerts a hidden, sometimes unstoppable force that results in a tangle of bids. Pre- emptive symptoms of Stendhal syndrome occur, for example recently, in a well-known Roman auction house, a user made 55 bids in a single session for some quite impressive works totaling well over 200,000 euro. Concerned by the peculiarity of the incident, the auction house staff contacted him and invited him to make a deposit of 20% on the total. The reply given was unbelievable: “Excuse me, I don’t have any money. I simply got carried away”. Bewilderment, disbelief and the immediate cancellation of the 55 bids created obvious damage to the company’s fading image followed by the likely futile recourse to legal departments to somehow protect its credibility. It will be interesting to see what emerges from any such lawsuit.
For our part, we remain convinced that the risk of a speculative bubble is particularly high. Here, the extraordinary resource of the internet risks becoming a toxic system. There from non-existing offers to happy requests for a condition report, questions are always on the table. It is undoubtedly a delicate system that requires new regulations to defend a market that calls for a constant emphasis on seriousness, concreteness, and objective certainties. These last few years have shown that the potential for growth with online auctions, the web and TV remains enormous. Conveying this flow in a positive direction is the true manifesto of the future for Italian and international art.
