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Amazon Expands Online Art Outlet

Thursday, August 8, 2013 - 13:57 by Mike Price

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Amazon started out selling books, but now sells everything from groceries to bouncy castles online. The latest area it has moved into is the sale of fine art, with a BETA testing version of its retail platform for this boutique type of product having been expanded this month, according to Complex.

Amazon Art now has around 40,000 individual works of art to view and buy, sourced from a pool of about 4500 different artists. The works are grouped into a number of different categories and you can buy paintings as well as photographic pieces via safe shopping online.

While you can get some of these artistic creations for under a couple of hundred pounds, there are some high end pieces up for sale too, including Flowers 1964 by Andy Warhol, which is being sold for the equivalent of several hundred thousand pounds.

There are, of course, a number of existing retail platforms which deal exclusively in the online sale of fine art, but with Amazon putting its cloud behind it, there could be much more global awareness of this particular avenue. Amazon Art is currently available to buyers in the US, although of course the international nature of the site means that aficionados from the UK can also make purchases there if they are willing to pay a little more for shipping.

The question now is whether serious collectors with big bank balances will actually feel comfortable with the idea of handing over vast sums via Amazon when they make their next acquisition. With online trading of other high value items already well established, this approach could even replace the auction house as the best place to get rare works of art. Amazon has fought its way to the top of the e-commerce pile by innovating and this new venture seems like a sensible next step.