Can AI Tell Us How Much to Pay for Art?
New tools are helping people navigate the opaque art market and get a sense of what different works should cost — but they don’t cover everything.
Andy Warhol's 'Shot Sage Blue Marilyn'.
Photographer: Angela Weiss/Getty Images
Stephen Smith, 56, a UK-based art collector, has bought prints through MyArtBroker, a sales and management platform for secondary-market prints and editions, since 2024, when he purchased Echo by British abstract artist Bridget Riley for £7,500 ($10,300). He uses the platform’s instant valuation tool, finding it helpful because he’s overpaid when buying from galleries before. “It gives quite a good, accurate impression of the price for a specific print at that particular time,” he says.
It’s notoriously difficult to know how much art should cost, because many galleries do not disclose prices and sales by galleries and dealers are rarely made public. The only publicly available sales information comes from art resold in the auction market. This can be frustrating for buyers, who either don’t feel confident enough to make purchases or, like Smith, say they’ve overpaid for art. More than half of collectors surveyed for the 2025 Deloitte Private and ArtTactic Art & Finance Report said the market’s lack of transparent pricing was a major barrier.