Today I discovered that Wikipedia does not have a page on “art appraisal.” They do have one on "art valuation,” though its contents, perhaps not surprisingly, are stilted.

In the first paragraph, its author-less voice proclaims that art valuation “is more of a financial rather than an aesthetic concern” — as if our financial valuations of art are not defined by well-honed “aesthetic concern,” usually over decades. The reader is then informed that our “subjective views” play a part as well, when in fact we are compelled by USPAP to perform our valuations in an independent, impartial, and objective manner. [NB: Opinions of value may vary (even significantly) even among seasoned appraisers, but any USPAP-compliant appraiser is bound to perform valuation services in this manner.]

Also worth adding, there is no Wikipedia page on the Appraisers Association of America, the premier association of personal property appraisers who focus on fine and decorative arts. There are two other major associations of appraisers, namely the International Association of Appraisers (ISA), which is also not represented on Wikipedia, and the American Society of Appraisers, which is represented by a brief Wikipedia page with no mention of art appraisal.

Why should we care? We all know that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, and we yet we all use it to some varying degree for expediency, trying to block out how fundamentally flawed it is. Misrepresentations and omissions of content are already a problem when it comes to personal consumption of information, but the problem is now compounded in the age of AI, which scrapes from all corners of the Internet, including Wikipedia.

What if you asked your AI tool how art is valued? What if it scraped that page, and then you used it in a professional capacity? What if you asked it who the people are who make their living by valuing art?

There are clearly vastly larger problems on Wikipedia with regard to bias, misrepresentation, and exclusion, but this is my corner of the world, so it is my example to highlight with respect to the potential for promulgation of misinformation. Yes, we should edit Wikipedia to rectify this tiny injustice, but the larger principle will remain that today, with AI scraping Wikipedia, it is nothing short of an echo chamber of unattributed statements, many of which are plainly wrong.

Perhaps I'm not the only one to have done a double take at Sotheby's loose language in their Instagram ad fed to me (and you?) today.

As Sotheby's should know perhaps as well as anyone, an auction estimate is not an appraisal. An auction estimate is a strategic figure designed to optimize results within a specific auction sale context.

An appraisal, by contrast, is an opinion of value (or, per USPAP, the act or process of developing such an opinion of value.). Depending on the type of value being appraised and the effective date of valuation used in an appraisal, and also depending on the specific auction sale context for a given estimate, an appraisal and an auction estimate for the same item may be similar -- or in many cases, they will differ significantly.

Sotheby's auction estimate for a work may be far higher than the estimate that a small auction house in the Midwest might give for the same work -- and both might be informed, accurate reflections of how best to market that item within their respective sale. These are not appraisals but rather context-bound marketing figures that reflect auction house perceptions of a specific market.