TEFAF market: High art going digital?

Last week I had an unique opportunity to visit one of the most prestigious fine art markets, The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF), which has been held in Maastricht in early March for the last thirty years. This is a big and classy business. It showcases works of art, primarily painting and sculptures but also furniture, jewellery, table art, manuscripts and rare books, spanning the entire history of art, from antiquity to contemporary. All together, some five thousand artefacts are exhibited by some 215 merchants, with a total pre-sale value over 1 billion euros. Both merchants and artefacts are individually selected and vetted by twenty four committees, comprising 142 experts.

Visiting TEFAF makes immediately apparent the scale and scope of the art business. Financial institutions are all over the place: providing insurance cover, bringing their high net worth clients (and I really mean high: upward of 10 million euros) and entertaining them, their advisers and merchants in well-stocked booths. The private Maastricht airport is quite busy with some clients flying in their private Boeings.

The visit of TEFAF is highly enjoyable, even if one cannot afford to buy anything (and the entry price is stiff, over 50 euros). The quality of artefacts is amazing and everything is done to make the visit pleasurable: tulips everywhere, free water fountains, easy chairs and a variety of foods, from classy to casual.

My visit was more than just an aesthetic experience. I went to Maastricht at the invitation of my good friend, Jean Penicaut, owner and CEO of small business specialising in high-value digitization of paintings, Lumiere Technology (LT). Lumiere had developed a very high resolution camera – 240 million pixels (professional quality cameras offer 10 million). Combined with a special lighting system, LT camera offers not only the highest possible resolution for quality printing but also a set of analytical tools to analyse the paintings, allowing in particular the analysis of successive layers and corrections as well as a detailed investigation of colour and paint. The company is well-known for its pioneering analysis of Monal Lisa.

LT was not part of the official exhibition. However, TEFAF also offers a number of booths used by financial institutions and selected service providers. Jean was lucky twice, to get a booth in the first place and to be located next to the bar, which guaranteed high traffic.

Jean told me that reactions to LT’s technology were highly polarised. Traditional experts saw it as either a threat or an upstart attempt to question their expertise. However, few galleries and experts saw it as a complementary tool for analysis of high-quality paintings. Such analysis would create objective, quantifiable and comparative data and could serve as a basis not only for certificates of authenticity but potentially for a system of ratings of the technical quality of paintings.

I am a firm believer in Andrew Grove’s law: if the technology exists it will eventually be used. And, knowing Jean’s energy, it is likely to be sooner rather than later. I am looking forward to a fruitful union between high tech and high art.