Bradley, thank you for the feedback on my article.

I appreciate the cautionary note about power brokers wanting to preserve secrecy around pricing and prizing exclusivity over market expansion. Nonetheless, I believe we are close to a tipping point away from this practice. The traditional stigma against posting prices for artworks is already under pressure as sellers realize that posting art online with a price tag fetches up to 6 times as many enquiries as does posting without a price.

Part of the reason for this in my mind comes down to changing perceptions of trust in today’s consumer culture, where we seek to control everything from our desktops and devices. Seeing prices for artworks online helps to give buyers a better feel for the current market value of various works, what they can afford to buy, and therefore more of the control they seek (and have even come to expect) in today’s technology-driven era.

The power brokers of the art world rely to a large extent on institutional trust for their outsized influence and control over the market, but in our rapidly changing technology landscape, we’re in the midst of a trust shift away from institutions towards a more distributed trust model.

As Rachel Botsman wisely observes in her book, Who Can You Trust: “Institutional trust, taken on faith, kept in the hands of a privileged minority and operating behind closed doors, simply wasn’t designed for the digital age”.