The Artfact Fine Arts CD‐ROM contains over three million records taken from art auction catalogs from all the major auction galleries and many minor ones. For each item, the database provides the title of the catalog, auction date, lot number, auctioneer, high and low estimates in US dollars, actual sale price, complete description of the item as written by the auction house experts, provenance, exhibitions (if any), and bibliography. The disc also contains several related databases, such as Falk’s Dictionary of Signatures &Monograms of American Artists, a database of American artists along with images of their signatures and monograms, and the Getty Union List of Artist Names, a compilation of over 137,000 citations of artist names compiled from thousands of sources. This latter database serves as a name authority file, as it includes variants of the artists’ names. Sister products include other related databases on the decorative arts and jewelry auction findings. The Decorative Art CD also contains the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, a seven‐volume thesaurus containing terminology in the fields of art and architecture and Maloney’s Collectibles Directory, an international Who’s Who of dealers, appraisers, auction houses, museums, clubs and societies, restoration resources, and specialty collectors. Purchase of the Fine Art or the Decorative Art disc includes the archive disc which contains data and images from 1988‐1992.
Artfact Fine Arts v. 2.12F is Artfact’s first product to use a Web browser as its search interface and, thus, to offer Web/CD‐ROM hybrid capabilities. This enables the company to offer expanded support and services online at any time during a search session. The CD cannot store all the images from all the catalogs it contains; so users can view them from the Web site and toggle between the Web site and the CD with a single keystroke. Other services provided on the Web site include a section “About art and antiques” that features a sort of thematic newsletter (feature of the fortnight) and a reference section that includes articles or treatises on New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania cabinetmakers, cabinetmakers of the south, and sections on Oriental art, including Korea, Japan, China, India,Cambodia, Thailand and Java.
The powerful search engine displays a search window on the left side of the screen and a results box on the right. The search window lists the databases for the user to make a selection and offers buttons to execute the search or to clear the fields. The search fields include the artist’s name, terms to include and terms to exclude, as well as boxes to search a range of actual sale prices. Besides the two fields to include or exclude search terms, researchers can use the Boolean and adjacency operators OR, AND, NOT, ADJ, W/ (term 1 within x words of term 2) NEAR, SAME (searches for word pairs that occur in the same paragraph or in a specified range of paragraphs [SAME/]), and NOTSAME (searches for records that contain paragraphs in which the term that precedes the operator occurs and the term that follows it does not). Researchers can also use range operators (> < >= <=) to limit searches to a particular value or range.
The search engine ignores capitalization ‐ Picasso, picasso, PICASSO and pICasSo are all identical ‐ and automatically performs “stemming” (searches for the term with common word endings such as “s”, “ed”, “ing”, etc.) by default. Enclosing the phrase in single quotes will turn off stemming and force the program to see the entire phrase as one unit; but it will not retrieve variants. Using a hyphen between the terms will both search the terms as a phrase (as if in single quotes) and perform stemming. When nesting terms in a search statement, parentheses determine the order of precedence in executing the query.
In addition to stemming, researchers can use the question mark or a dollar sign as a single wild card character or an asterisk for multiple characters. They can also restrict a search to one particular field by using a colon between the search term and the field name. For example, “2001:actual” will find occurrences of 2001 only within the actual sale price field, locating anything that sold for $2,001 but not a movie composer of “2001, A Space Odyssey”. One can restrict the entire query to one or more specified fields by using the query‐level field restriction operator (/f: ) before each field name.
Researchers can also make use of a wide variety of additional operators. For example, the exclamation point (concept operator) generates a list of words related to the query term to which it is appended. It searches for the query term and any related terms. A tilde (∼ fuzzy search operator) locates words with similar spelling to the query term. The @ (thesaurus operator) searches for synonyms of the query term, while the document operator (D_) searches for records that are similar in content to the record with a specified ID number.
When the search engine retrieves the documents, it displays a results list (hit list) which gives a brief descriptive overview of each document. Selecting an individual record displays the complete lot information. When an image is available for a particular lot, it will have a hyperlink: click here for remote Web image. Image links are only active in the detailed description (document display).
In the previous version of the software, also installed from the CD for those who prefer not to change to a Web browser interface, one could search for images by using “JPG” as a search term. However, doing so in the new software disables the hyperlink text used to open images. Artfact is working with the software publisher to fix this in future releases. In the meantime, one can search for “click” to locate only records with images.
Artfact Fine Arts contains the full text of more auction catalogs than any similar product. Searching such a large quantity of information in hard copy would be an extremely tedious and time‐consuming task. That endeavor can now be performed instantaneously, as Artfact Fine Arts has the most powerful search engine this reviewer has ever worked with bar none. The software designers also placed the navigation buttons (search, clear, hit list, previous ranked document, and next ranked document) at the top and bottom of their respective windows; so researchers do not have to scroll back and forth to find what they want.
The software has been designed to address the art professional’s need to evaluate common objects against fair market values. Art historians can use it similarly as well for researching market economics or performing market studies. They can use it for both financial and attribution appraisals, as well as to study the provenance of a work and to compare it to other similar items to see how one artist influences another. Some descriptions can be rather brief while others, particularly for major works, can be very lengthy and include an extensive bibliography. This information can be very valuable to artists and art dealers.
Museum professionals and curators can use this product to verify authenticity and to compare similar known items. They can use it to research artists with connections to a location or institution. Historical renovators or reconstructionists can use it to verify room colors, décor, etc. in period paintings or to compare existing known items for verification. Any library that collects art catalogs will find this an indispensable product. Artfact Fine Arts has many uses that transcend its primary audience of professional art dealers and is highly recommended.
