Phillips’ Articker Meticulously Measures The Stupendous Success Of Salman Toor, Amoako…

Salman Toor stunned the art world in December last year when Liberty Porcelain (2012) sold for £378,000 ($505,688), more than nonuple the low estimate of £40,000 and more than sextuple the high estimate of £60,000, leading Phillips’s New Now sale in London. The same month, Toor’s Rooftop Ghost Party I, one part of a 2015 triptych, fetched $822,000, more than five times the high estimate of $150,000 at Christie’s in New York. Phillips sold three of Toor’s paintings between October and December last year.

The gay, Pakistan-born, New York-based artist shared in the surprise.

When Christopher Y. Lew, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Nancy and Fred Poses Curator, and curatorial assistant Ambika Trasi asked Toor if he’d be interested in a solo show, he was nearly invisible in the Western art world. Salman Toor: How Will I Know, which opened on November 13, 2020, and is on view until April 4, has been met with critical acclaim. 

The 38-year-old artist’s first museum solo exhibition features new and recent oil paintings that depict young, queer Brown men splitting their time between New York City and South Asia. His small-scale figurative works marry conventional technique with a rapid, sketching style. His play with subtle colors references art history to convey dreamy emotions, even isolation, while the images depict dancing friends, blissful puppies, and folks fixated on their smartphones. His complex narratives invite a thoughtful dialogue about contemporary queer life. 

“Phillips first introduced Salman Toor to the secondary market just a few months ago in our London Evening Sale. Since then, the demand has skyrocketed with collectors across the Americas, Europe, and Asia all vying for his works,” said Jean-Paul Engelen, deputy chairman of Phillips. “Drawing inspiration from his own life, pop culture, and the larger art historical canon, his paintings resonate deeply with people of all backgrounds, which is certainly one of the reasons that they consistently outperform their pre-sale estimates.  His successful exhibition at the Whitney has only strengthened his position.”

Since it launched last August, Phillips’ Articker, the first technology platform that aggregates real-time, open-source data on modern and contemporary artists and artworks, has expanded to offer unrivaled information that can help predict emerging market trends. The invaluable analytics tool was created in partnership between Phillips’ digital team and Articker, founded in 2014 by father and son duo Tomasz and Konrad Imielinski. 

Tomasz Imieliński, a PhD computer scientist and professor of computer science at Rutgers University, Konrad Imielinski, Co-Founder at ArtData Labs, and Engelen, offered an insider view of the expansive, interactive online database that continues to draw from a growing sources of meticulously vetted information. During a Zoom meeting, I observed the many facets of a model that will become indispensable for collectors and buyers who rely on credible predictions.

I was transported back to the first decade of the 21st century, when I spent hours in front of gargantuan, interactive screens at the expansive offices of global financial behemoths, or the odd spaces rented by nimble tech-driven startups reacting to every regulatory whim, and ostentatious securities industry conferences, observing world-leading engineers building the back end of Wall Street platforms that promised elite investors singular access to the data essential to retaining and gaining the lion’s share of assets. The Articker demo experience was of equal intellectual caliber, only focused on my most coveted market: art, and my most beloved sector: contemporary. Not to mention that it reveals a slice of the market that I’m only hearing whispers about.

Toor’s rocketing appreciation over the last year in the upper right-hand corner of his Articker overview page is supported by datasets that offer insights across evaluation and projection. Articker carefully examines media mentions, weighing their importance based on quality of reporting and writing, and filtering out deceptive attempts to bolster search engine optimization (SEO). Unlike a Google search that prioritizes any content that uses a keyword even if the topic is never mentioned in the text, Articker scrutinizes all media attention with a scholarly, technical eye. 

Articker investigates social issues, an area of data that is critical when measuring the nearly instantaneous meteoric rise of Jammie Holmes, the Black, Dallas-based artist who burst into the art world when he turned our gazes to the sky with They’re Going to Kill Me (2020). Holmes’ aerial demonstration punctured the clouds in Detroit, Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles, and New York, by raising awareness of rampant police brutality by figuratively screaming George Floyd’s desperate cries for help, such as “They’re going to kill me” and “My neck hurts.”

The fever chart on Amoako Boafo’s Articker overview page tells the same story of sudden, sensational success. The 37-year-old Ghana-born, Vienna, Austria-based portraiture and figurative painter has taken the art world by storm since he came to Los Angeles in 2019 for an artist-in-residency program.

“After being Articker’s top emerging artist of 2019, Amoako Boafo continued through 2020 with uninterrupted momentum, with his success permeating beyond the traditional art world and into fashion with his widely covered collaboration with Dior,” the Imielińskis said. “With his activist art media spike in summer of  2020, Jammie Holmes’ institutional and gallery support followed.  It all placed him at the top of Articker’s emerging artists coming into 2021.”

Phillips plans to offer its clients access to Articker, enabling them to ask specialists informed questions to best elevate confidence in investing.