Before she opened her gallery in 1999, art dealer Debra Force worked at New York’s Hirschl & Adler, relying on paper file cards that listed information on individual works in the gallery’s inventory and what clients had bought over the years. The principal source of concern was if a card became too smudged to read or if a client looked over her shoulder to see what was written on it. These days, she depends on ArtSystems, a collections management database program that organizes information on inventory—title, name of artist, medium, dimensions, condition, sales price history and appraised value, provenance, location (in the gallery, on loan, in storage), photographic images and inventory number—and clients, and her largest worry now is a power outage or system failure. “If the system goes down, I can’t do anything,” she said.

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It isn’t just Force. A rapidly growing number of commercial art galleries and museums, as well as large-scale collectors and even some artists, use database programs of this type to help them keep track of art and artifacts—often, via an app.

Galleries, museums, art collectors and artists all have different needs, but according to Justin Anthony, co-founder of Artwork Archive, another artwork collections database program in a growing field, the greatest desire is giving “organization to chaos,” the “chaos” being the flood of disparate information about all the objects. That organization comes in handy for collectors, for instance, when there is “a life event like a move, a death in the family, a natural disaster or nearing or reaching retirement age. That last factor has been a major driver over the last few years and one we see continuing as thousands of Baby Boomers are reaching retirement and thinking about their legacy and estate planning.”

Let’s say I am an art collector, and I am preparing my will, downsizing or rewriting my insurance policy. Where are my Goya prints… in my summer house on the Cape or in storage?........

© Observer