Or if you’re interested in cutting out the intermediary, you could look at the private collectors who’ve bought specific Whitereads over the years and contact them directly. A collector might be willing to sell for the right price.

“If the question is how useful is it for someone coming into the art world—or who doesn’t really go to auctions but wants to know who the players are—I think it’s very useful,” says the dealer Christophe Van de Weghe, who makes 184 appearances in Baer’s database. 

Peer Review
The idea for a searchable database originated, Baer says, a few years ago on the suggestion of his art lawyer, Tom Danziger.

By the time Glenn Fuhrman’s family office, Virtru Investment Partners and LionTree Partners, acquired a minority stake in the Baer Faxt in October 2020, “they knew it was a product I had in mind to produce, and it was part of the valuation of the company for that transaction,” Baer continues. (He declines to confirm the monetary value of the stake.)

Part of the database’s value is its proven veracity: Baer has been circulating his findings to the very people he reports on. “If it wasn’t accurate, they contacted me,” he says.

It’s a database, in other words, that’s effectively fact checked by peer review. In fact, Bloomberg spot-checked the database by calling multiple dealers and advisors, all of whom confirmed the entries in which they were listed.

Ongoing Relevance
But the database’s strength—namely that nearly every entry was verified by Baer himself—is also its weakness. He could only be in so many places at once, and his focus was on a specific subset of auctions.

“I’d say the majority of the entries were from evening sales in New York and London’s contemporary, postwar, Impressionist, and modern categories,” Baer says. The rest is from lower-priced day sales in the same categories.

There isn’t, in other words, a profusion of data for anyone hoping to break into the old master market. Nor will a collector interested in the antique porcelain market find much to work with. And of course, Baer isn’t omniscient: Many buyers at auction choose to remain anonymous, which means his entries are heavily weighted toward the dealers and art advisors who bid publicly.

A further issue is that the data appear to be thinner from 2018 to 2019. (The Covid-19 pandemic then put a stop to reporting.) This is an anecdotal impression based on a few days of poking around the database, but it’s a characterization that Baer says is “probably not wrong” and could be “a function of all the other things [he was] doing.”