About Beetle

Free art market data for everyone.

The art market is one of the most exciting places to invest. Beetle makes it easier to do it well.

We built a free platform that brings auction data, price histories, and market analytics together in one place. Search for any artist. See what their work has sold for, where, and when. Understand how their market moves over time. Compare results. Spot patterns. Then decide for yourself.

There is no subscription. There is no account. There is no paywall. The data is here and it's free, because we believe that better access to information makes better decisions possible.

A complete market view for any artist. Think of it as a Bloomberg screen for the art market.

When you open a Terminal, you're looking at the full picture of an artist's auction history. Not a summary, not a highlights reel, but the complete dataset. Every lot that has passed through a sale room, tracked and organised into something you can actually read and use.

At the top, you get the headline numbers. Total lots tracked, total lots sold, the sell-through rate, and the artist's top sale. These four figures alone give you a clear read on an artist's market health. A high sell-through rate means demand is real. A low one means work is going unsold, regardless of what anyone says about the artist's trajectory.

Below that, the price chart. This plots every auction result over time, giving you a visual read on whether an artist's market is growing, plateauing, or cooling down. You can see at a glance whether a spike in prices was sustained or whether it was a one-off. This is the kind of context that turns a price tag into a data point.

Then there's the recent activity section. The most recent auction results, laid out with dates, sale houses, lot titles, and hammer prices. If you're tracking an artist you're interested in buying, this is where you see what's happening right now.

Further down, the full lot table. Every single result, searchable, sortable, and filterable. You can search by lot title, filter by sale house, sort by price, and page through years of results. Each row gives you the date, the lot title, the sale house, the currency, the estimate, and the final price. If the lot went unsold, you see that too. Unsold lots are just as important as sold ones when you're trying to understand a market.

The Terminal also includes price distribution data, showing you where the bulk of an artist's sales cluster. Understanding where most of the market sits gives you real context when you're evaluating a specific price.

Everything in the Terminal is currency-adjusted. If an artist sells in New York in dollars, London in pounds, and Paris in euros, you see all of it normalised so the numbers are actually comparable.

Search by criteria, not just by name. Find artists you didn't know existed.

Most platforms make you search by name. Type in an artist, get their page. That works if you already know exactly who you're looking for. But it doesn't help if you're exploring. It doesn't help if you know what kind of art you like but not who makes it. And it certainly doesn't help if you're trying to discover emerging markets or undervalued areas before everyone else does.

Creative Search works differently. Instead of searching by name, you search by criteria. Nationality. Gender. Century. Movement. Medium. Society memberships. You can combine as many filters as you want, and Beetle returns every artist in the database that matches.

Say you're interested in contemporary Japanese printmakers. Set the filters and you'll see every artist who fits, ranked and searchable, with full Terminal access for each one. Or maybe you want to explore 19th-century French sculptors, or living British painters, or post-war American abstractionists. Creative Search lets you define what you're looking for and then shows you who's out there.

This is how you find artists that nobody else has heard of yet. It's how you discover entire markets and movements that are underpriced because they're under-known. The art market rewards knowledge more than almost any other asset class, and Creative Search is built to give you that edge.

It's also how you build context. If you already follow an artist, Creative Search helps you understand who their contemporaries are, who else is working in the same movement, same medium, same period. That kind of contextual awareness is what separates a collector from a buyer.

A live ranking of the top-performing artists by total auction value.

Blue Chip gives you a view of the art market from the top down. These are the artists whose work commands the highest prices, moves the most volume, and defines the shape of the global auction market. The names at the top of this list aren't surprises. But how they rank against each other, how that ranking shifts, and the scale of the numbers involved often is.

Understanding the Blue Chip end of the market matters even if you're not buying at that level. These artists set the benchmarks. Their sell-through rates establish what strong demand looks like. Their price trends signal where the broader market is heading. When Blue Chip artists start selling below estimate, it tells you something about collector confidence across the board.

Blue Chip Rankings also give you a sense of proportion. When you're evaluating a mid-career artist selling at a certain price point, it helps to know where that sits relative to the top of the market. It helps to know what the ceiling looks like, what kind of trajectory a market needs to sustain those prices, and how rare it is for an artist to reach that level.

This is the kind of overview that used to take years of accumulated market knowledge to build. Now it's one page. Free. Updated with every sale.

Every auction result normalised, currency-adjusted, and stored. That's the entire point.

Raw auction data is almost useless on its own. A painting that sold for $50,000 in New York in 2019 and another that sold for €38,000 in Paris in 2023 are not directly comparable without adjusting for currency. Most people don't do that calculation. Beetle does it automatically.

Price tracking means you're not just seeing a list of numbers. You're seeing trends. You're seeing whether an artist's market is appreciating, holding steady, or declining. You're seeing whether a recent price spike was part of a longer trajectory or an outlier driven by a single enthusiastic bidder. You're seeing seasonality, sale house patterns, and the difference between what the market says a work should sell for and what it actually sells for.

Over time, price tracking turns scattered auction results into a readable story about an artist's market. And that story is what tells you whether now is the right time to buy, the right time to sell, or the right time to wait.

This data is also the foundation that everything else on the platform is built on. The more results we track, the more precisely we can understand how markets move. Price tracking isn't just a feature. It's the engine underneath all of it.

Find the most comparable sales for any work. No black boxes. No guesswork.

When you're looking at a specific work, the question isn't just "what has this artist sold for?" It's "what has similar work by this artist sold for?"

An artist might have a median sale price of £5,000, but that number is meaningless if their oils sell for £20,000 and their prints sell for £800. The medium matters. The size matters. The period matters. Whether it's signed matters. Whether it's an original or an edition matters. A single average price flattens all of that into one useless number.

LotRank is our answer to that problem. It's a matching algorithm that takes a specific lot and finds the most comparable sales in the database. It scores every potential match across multiple dimensions, factoring in medium, size, period, sale context, and more. Then it ranks them by relevance, so the most comparable results appear first.

Every match comes with transparent reason codes. You can see exactly why a particular lot was selected as a comparable. Was it the same medium? Similar dimensions? Sold at the same house? The reason codes are visible, so you're never guessing at why a match was made.

LotRank is what makes Beetle useful for actual decision-making, not just browsing. If you're about to bid on a work at auction, LotRank shows you what similar works have sold for recently. If you're trying to value something in a private collection, LotRank gives you the comparable sales data you need. If you're pricing work for a fair, LotRank tells you what the auction market says.

What's Next

We're always building. New ideas, new tools, new ways to make the art market a little easier to navigate.

If there's something that can save you time or help you make a better decision, we want to build it. That's what gets us up in the morning.