The transformation of the auction market from crusty old seller of antiques to cutting-edge 21st industry offers a potent examples of how fast an e-commerce revolution can take hold.
Last year, new kid on the block, eBay bought San Francisco 's Butterfield & Butterfield for $260m. eBay had been trading for less than five years; Butterfield & Butterfield had been trading for 135.
In November, online bookseller, Amazon, bought $45.4m worth of Sothebys equity. But even though the gold dust has yet to settle in the auction houses - expect a further round of acquisitions and launches in the coming months - another online storm is already brewing, this time in the art market.
In the US, a number of online art galleries have already been shifting some very valuable works of art. One anonymous buyer on Artnet.com bought Lucio Fontana's 1959 Concetto Spaziale, Attese, for a cool $168,000 last year, while paintings on Ewolf.com have sold for similar amounts.
Late last year saw the launch of Eyestorm.com, a UK-based company that hopes to revolutionise the global art market by opening up its dealings to a wider public. Eyestorm sees itself as being able to create a "parallel market", by bringing works of art to a new audience. It sells a mixture of unique items - such as Warhol Polaroids and photocollages by David Hockney - and limited edition prints by the likes of Andy Goldsworth and Damien Hirst.
"Our task is to make art more accessible," says Eyestorm's chief executive Don Atkinson. "And we are doing that by showing the work to a world wide audience as opposed to a very limited audience that exists in the gallery system."
To do this, Eyestorm required a budget said to be about $5m. It raised the money through venture capitalists eVenture and Arts Alliance. After some pretty heavy market research, the company thinks it has spotted a gap in the market and is convinced that its investment will lead to a lucrative slice of the e-conomy.
"Another way in which we are making art more accessible is in our price strategy," says Atkinson. "What we have done is manage to persuade artists to run limited edition prints, usually one to 500, and for them to agree a reduced price point - one that averages between $400 and $500."
Londonart, a small independent company, has been selling art exclusively online since 1997. With approximately one tenth of Eyestorm's budget the site initially struggled to make any impact on the London market. But the last six months have seen sales rise by 50% per month, and it might even turn a small profit by the end of the year.
Paul Wynter, managing director of Londonart, says an online art market is emerging because, "gallery spaces are very difficult for some people who feel they are likely to be given the cold shoulder. The internet presents no barrier to anyone entering, viewing or buying art. I think that is fantastic."
Both Eyestorm and Londonart see the key to their success in providing editorial content to accompany their wares. This makes both sites attractive, not just to prospective buyers, but to art lovers as a whole. Londonart carries an online magazine and extensive arts listings. Eyestorm has embraced the interactive aspects on the internet and provided some impressive multi-media "documentaries ' to accompany the artists it represents. It also offers the chance to curate your own online gallery, and if desktop pictures are your thing, you could do worse than look here.
Atkinson says: "We make our artists' work more approachable by expanding understanding about the work itself. We do this by emphasising editorial on our website, because we think that people need to read about the artists and to understand the period when the piece was made." Unlike many e-commerce sites, both Eyestorm and Londonart employ full-time editors and have a brigade of notable critics to back them up.
But what is to stop artists simply selling their work from their own website? Says Atkinson: "When an artist comes to us, they get to concentrate on their work. We give them access to new technology, our considerable marketing clout and our distribution channel."
Wynter adds that new customers will generate new market forces. This, he says, is forcing existing galleries to wake up. "I think most most galleries are already in the stages of building a website or are certainly planning to do so. But I think the key point is that if you are a gallery or an artist, it is going to prove very difficult to be found - even if you are relatively well known.
"I think selling art online will really come down to specialist players who have the expertise to build content and place useful information alongside the art that is on sale."
Also joining the fray next month will be San Francisco-based www.iTheo.com , which claims to provide a site where artists can promote, market and sell their own work to "a world of new collectors, without the barriers of gallery walls".
The site is offering $12,000 in cash grants, which along with the commissioning powers of sites like Eyestorm and Londonart, should prove to artists that the web may be the ideal place to sell their work in the 21st century.
It is still early days, and the art market is notoriously secretive and slow-moving, so don't expect a raft of stock market flotations just yet. But the appetite for buying fine art, antiques and collectables continues to grow. Although no specific figures exist on art sales online, Forrester Research predicts that online auction sales will reach $19bn per year by 2003.
A couple of years ago, who would imagined that the time-honoured auction houses were about to come under the hammer to a set of internet upstarts? A couple of years from now, it may well be the galleries who are forced to transform themselves into an industry of the future.
