From Roger Lipsey's _An Art of Our Own - the Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art_: "A fourth feature of some markets, including the market for contem- porary art, is that the value of new products can be defined and pro- moted subjectively- without doing harm. In these markets, one cannot really trust words. There may be relatively objective standards by which the quality of art can be judged, but buyers are not so often well-versed in applying them, and in any case one can't always be sure. Fortunately, the products are safe no matter how poorly designed. Works of art are not elevators; if one falls, no harm. A great empty ply-wood box can be described as austere, vigorously antisublime, starkly beautiful--and so on. The emperor may have no clothes, but what if he has an excellent figure? The merchant's job is to test his market and to sell. He makes no mistake to extol the virtues of his inventory in glowing terms. Objective measurement can be left to posterity."

Dunbier on Fine Art Valuation by Roger Dunbier I grew up in an artist's studio. My father, Augustus Dunbier, took up painting in 1907 and continued in that endeavor for sixty-five years, principally in Omaha, Nebraska. He was born on a central Nebraska farm about ten years after his father turned over the prairie grass for the first time. My father's formal art education was highlighted by seven years at the Royal Art Academy, Dusseldorf. He also attended the Chicago Art Institute where he became a close friend of Walter Ufer, who, in 1919, persuaded my father to come to Taos, something he then did almost every summer. As a child I traveled with my father and mother on summer field painting trips to both coasts, the Southwest and Mexico. I witnessed hundreds of paintings in the making and heard seemingly endless discussion about techniques and quality. Later I spent a good deal of time with my parents in Europe, where art museums were always on the itinerary. I have childhood memories of visiting Taos artists in their studios there, artists such as Leon Gaspard, Joseph Henry Sharp, and I. Eanger Couse. To me at that time, these were just old men who were friends of my father. It was my good fortune to obtain a post-graduate Marshall Scholarship to Oxford University in England, where I spent the better part of seven years obtaining three degrees including the doctorate. These degrees were in the fields of geography and economics--I inherited only minimal amounts of my father's artistic talents! My Ph D dissertation, now a published book, was on the Sonoran Desert. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, I became interested in the computer, particularly in its ability to store and manipulate huge amounts of data. In 1963, I moved to Arizona, and I have continued to live there with the exception of a few years in Nebraska where I taught at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and in southern California where I was a professor of geography at the University of California-Irvine. My first hands-on experience with computers was in 1963 while employed by a major bank research department. In the years that followed, as an independent researcher, I developed several applications in the area of computerized mapping and real estate values. With a colleague, I created the first computerized multiple listing program--its descendant now in use across the country. Currently I live with my wife, Lonnie, in Scottsdale, Arizona, and both of us are employed full time in the business of American fine art. Fifteen years ago, I had an idea. It was 1982, and even though I had grown up in the art business, I had never given any concentrated thought to what constituted monetary value in fine art beyond the most apparent vagaries, realities and clich�s of supply and demand. In that year, it became apparent to me that in this country there existed nothing remotely resembling a comprehensive reliable informational system of any kind wherein independent unbiased estimates of value could be established. For art prices, reliance upon indexes of art auction-prices-realized in book forms was usually incremented by telephone calls to experts who would provide anecdotal data. All but a few living artist's prices were in the main established through these two methods. Artists that were and are principally resident in mid-continent America seldom had works in major auction houses. Numerous very good early day painters almost never had paintings come up for sale at auction. For these, guess-work was too much the order of the day. Something should be done. No comprehensive system of inter-artist comparability existed. Very little or usually no use was made of comparables, so indispensable to real estate appraisal. Museum and gallery catalogues, coffee table and art reference books as well as monographs upon which artist name values are grounded were not taken into measured calculation at all. In the year 1982, no system in the true sense of that word existed, even in an embryonic form. It was then that I decided to do something about this circumstance. One of the first things I did was acquire a skillful programmer, Charles Lefebvre, who has been with me from this earliest time. Now, the solution did not arrive all at once but evolved over the first ten years or so. The problems that presented themselves lay in several areas: How to separate the objective and measurable from subjective, aesthetic preferences. How to isolate the artists' "name values" or level of recognition from the complex of elements found in medium, size, choice of subject, etc. How to build upon these elements to provide a consistently valid name-value-number to be used in calculating the price of any picture by that painter under scrutiny. How to further verify this number by comparison with other painters in the database. From this evolved our now indispensable concept of RANKING artists relative to each other and, totally unique to us, COMPARABLES in the art marketplace. How to integrate the totality of art literature--monographs, overviews, museum catalogues, etc.-- into the value calculations to underpin the more direct auction results and anecdotal data. How to retain and effectively evaluate information from years ago to show meaningful and accurate trends over time. How to establish sources of information so that illustrators, wildlife artists, naive, miniaturists, mid-continent residents, Native American and other isolated artists could be brought into the system on a realistic basis. How to keep current while at the same time discounting the all too prevalent hype of the promotional marketplace. How to produce "make-sense" reader and user-friendly output from what was to become a mountain of data. How to make this all affordable and eventually indispensable. It is now fifteen years later. It is ninety-thousand hours of systems design, programming and data entry later. It is also hundreds of good ideas, some discarded, and many successful NEWSBook publications later. Very importantly, while we worked here at ENCompass, computer manufacturers were also busy, and their machines' capacities kept getting larger while getting ever smaller and more affordable. All of this means that in 1997 we are making available a vest-pocket computer programmed with our Top Collectible 13,000 American painters. With this, you can obtain, in a matter of minutes, all the information you need for a valid price estimate. Independent of a telephone line or a book from the shelf, it is a take-it anywhere package. It is called smART WALK. Something has been done... from http://www.tfaoi.com/articles/rd2.htm