artnet News is happy to share the announcement of a new branch on our family tree: artnet has joined forces with Dr. Fabian Bocart, co-founder of Tutela Capital, who will head artnet Analytics. This enhances artnet’s offerings, which already include the Price Database, Analytics Reports, and Market Alerts, in addition to artnet Auctions, the Gallery Network, and artnet News.
Tutela, founded in Belgium in 2011, provides “research, tools, and analysis that contribute to transparency and efficiency in the market for art and collectibles.” Art historians, statisticians, econometricians, and specialists in business and finance round out their team.
While at Tutela, Dr. Bocart offered scientific valuations and predictive modeling for artworks, adding quantitative backing to the pricing, for professionals in finance, law, and academia.
Importantly, Dr. Bocart is a specialist of “fair value measurement” model for art valuations that complies with international regulatory disclosure standards, allowing banks and hedge funds to leverage art as an investment vehicle. As such, Dr. Bocart helped to build a business model that responds to the growing recognition of art as an asset class in its own right.
“It is important to highlight that artnet is the only company that can really do this, because we are the only ones with the quality—and, to a certain degree, quantity—of the data,” said artnet CEO Jacob Pabst. “A focus on quality data,” he added, “gives artnet an edge. No one has the quality of data that we have because no one invests that much into cleaning it. This is why Dr. Fabian Bocart also wanted to join artnet and no one else.”
Pabst speaks highly of Tutela, and co-founder Dr. Bocart, offering: “Someone with his background who dedicated his entire professional life on the art market is impossible to find…I wanted to work with Dr. Bocart because of what he had built. Matching this with our data is very powerful.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that artnet acquired Tutela Capital. This article has been updated to show that Dr. Fabian Bocart has joined the company as head of artnet Analytics.