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After hyperbolic growth boosted by the pandemic, the online art sales market, which reached 10.8 billion dollars (9.9 billion euros) in 2022, is showing a serious slowdown. According to the latest report from the insurer Hiscox published on April 26, a third of collectors expect to make fewer online purchases over the next twelve months, due to a drop in their income.
It is in this somewhat uncertain context that Maurice Lévy, 81, former boss of Publicis, is launching on Monday May 15 at the Palais de Tokyo a new artistic digital platform called “YourArt” (www.yourart.art), with the stated ambition of positioning itself as the “YouTube of art”, a social network facilitating access to artists and galleries.
After having entrusted, in 2017, the reins of the advertising group to his heir apparent, Arthur Sadoun, the guru of advertising has therefore returned to the charge in a field that he has secretly loved for fifty years. Maurice Lévy indeed collects works by Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages and Victor Brauner. And he familiarized himself with today’s art by chairing the board of directors of the Palais de Tokyo from 2003 to 2007.
A project carried out with powerful friends
But it is the unknown creators, the second in line, those who fight in the shadows and are desperate to meet amateurs or curators, who preoccupy him. About ten years ago, in the course of a study on the art world, he came across a figure that disconcerted him: there were no less than 200 million amateur artists in the world. “I told myself that I was going to offer them the largest gallery in the world”, he recalls. His entourage immediately dissuaded him. “You’re going to pick up scabs, and there’s already so much out there, what the hell are you going to do in there?” », say his relatives. Maurice Lévy repackages the idea, without ever forgetting it.
To carry out his project, this network man raised 9 million euros from some twenty powerful friends, such as the American financier and patron Henry Kravis, who popularized the decried model of debt buyout, Patrick Drahi, boss of Altice, or Jean-Paul Agon, the former CEO of L’Oréal.
Nearly three hundred artists, professionals or amateurs, have already registered. But the most difficult thing remains to convince the galleries, in an art market stratified in exclusive, even excluding chapels. The brands of the first division, whose base unit is the million dollars, enjoy little promiscuity with less popular galleries or unknown artists. And the offer of online services is already plethoric: today there are no less than sixty-two online art marketplaces. According to the Hiscox report, 71% of them also anticipate a movement of mergers, linked to the slowdown in the market.
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