The Trouble with eBay

The Trouble With eBay

Photo courtesy of eBay

A search for original art on eBay

Photo courtesy of eBay

A search for art on eBay

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Even a few years ago, it was near to impossible to lay your hands on those back issues of magazines, those out-of-print books, beloved lost artifacts from our childhoods—and all of the other items that are eBay specialties.

And there are many specialties. One of the Web site’s strengths—and continuing fascinations, in my opinion—is the range of stuff that people are buying and selling on there in vast quantities. As its current ads tell us, you can get “it” on eBay, and “it,” apparently, can be just about anything.

Still, we had to ask, does this “anything” really include fine art? Is eBay a serious option for making purchases of original contemporary works?

Well, I found, it rather depends on what you’re looking for.

The Search Begins

There is a vast amount of art on eBay. It’s a principal category listed on the homepage (in between Antiques and Baby, to be exact), and the Web site even offers its users an Art Buying Guide, which caters to everyone, “whether you’re an experienced collector or simply looking to decorate your home.”

But when I typed the words “original contemporary art” into eBay’s search engine, the results were unbelievably depressing. 547 items appeared, and after trawling through the first 350 of them—which was as many as I could face—I came to the conclusion that there wasn’t a single one I would give house room to.

The sellers used descriptive phrases such as “unique,” “inspirational” and “compelling,” but the words that occurred to me were “kitsch,” “derivative” and “unwanted” (for only a handful had attracted even a single bid).

Misleading descriptions stemmed most often from general ignorance. Pieces were headlined as “HUGE!” when they were only 36 inches wide. Drawings were called watercolors—one piece was described as both a photograph and a drawing—and stylistic terms were used almost at random: “Pop Art,” “Surrealist” and “Deco” seemed most rampant.

The one word that was used accurately was “abstract”—and it occurred far more often than I’d expected. For every one representational piece that showed up in my selection, there were at least 10 abstractions. They came in the form of stripes or circles, but most commonly as swirly patterns and unidentifiable geometrical shapes.

Clearly, I discovered, abstraction is in vogue on eBay, as is brushiness and color schemes ranging from browns to ochres to reds.

Meet the Sellers

Among the few sellers offering representational pieces, someone in the U.K., called “Zoogroove,” has drawings by an “aspiring contemporary artist” at a standard starting price of £2.99. There are 41 separate lots, all of which bear cutesy cartoon animals made in “charcoal pencil” on watercolor paper. Unfortunately not a single one was the recipient of a bid.

Which is a shame really, because Zoogroove has a whole cataloguing operation that’s ready to swing into action. “Each individual piece is signed and dated by the artist and all paintings/drawings sold are recorded and catalogued as part of an ongoing exhibition of work,” the seller boasts.

In addition, for only £3.75 shipping costs, I could have the artwork sent to me here in New York “packed using bubble wrap, card reinforcement and heavy duty parcel paper.”

But while this all sounds very appealing—and legitimate—every piece Zoogroove listed had the irrelevant word “IKEA” in the title or description. Though this is a common trick used on eBay to attract more search hits, it’s a sneaky one, if you ask me.

But Don’t Take Our Word for It

Of course, any description of eBay is only accurate at the moment that it is uttered. Try the same exercise I did, and you may discover all sorts of things you like, perhaps even bargains. (I once discovered on there what might have been an original Saul Steinberg drawing).

And in their defense, many of the sellers I encountered on the site had their own online eBay stores—a reflection of their specialization and seriousness—and were well-established Internet vendors with long lists of approving purchasers. Who am I to judge their business, right? And I suspect that if they saw much of the artwork I regularly cover on ArtInfo, they’d laugh out loud and accuse me of snobbery—or worse.