The art market has been one of the rare sectors to keep digitalization at arms length for decades, until the 2020 pandemic and subsequent restrictions forced art galleries and auction houses to fully rely on technology for the first time. In the wake of this accelerated digitalization, certain technologies have faced a renewed interest for their potential to modernize the art market, in particular artificial intelligence and the highly mediatized blockchain technology, carried by the mainstream appeal gained by NFTs. If the general application of these technologies to art trade has already been studied through the case of auction houses, to date, no research has specifically explored the impact of distributed ledger technologies or artificial intelligence on the beating heart of the contemporary art market: art galleries. Hence, this research aims to evaluate the extent to which artificial intelligence and distributed ledger technologies could fundamentally transform art dealership. To that end, we confronted the scientific literature drawing from business administration, computer science and art history to the results of a quantitative research carried on a representative sample of professionals operating in the art dealership sector.
