ArtFacts.Net

[4] The years before the global financial crisis caused the art market and the number of galleries to grow rapidly worldwide.

Galleries, which were previously ArtFacts' main customers, declined, and thereby endangered the company not only financially but also in terms of collecting exhibition data.

With the introduction of new memberships, for example for artists, curators or collectors, the situation could be compensated for and the reach into the art world even increased.

Many artists 'disappearing' after their deaths was acknowledged by the founder Marek Claassen, and a this database aims to address part of this challenge.

ArtFacts relates artists to one another using a complex algorithm that assumes that each exhibition carries a different weight in the art world.

The theoretical background of this approach are, for example, the cultural-sociological studies of Pierre Bourdieu or Georg Franck 's book Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit from 1998.

[6] The ranking is controversially discussed in the art world: for example, the business magazine Capital publishes the top 100 artists once a year, based on data from Artfacts.

[7] Whilst the ranking algorithm is critiqued quite widely for its lack of transparency and perhaps inbuilt biases towards German artists and galleries/museums due to the sampling and membership prevalence.