ADEC Art Price Guide

The Annuaire des Cotes Moyennes (ADEC) runs ArtPrice.com, a website that provides exhaustive information on purchasing and selling art at auctions. With a database that contains 290,000 catalogs and 25 million auction house results, ArtPrice.com has become an authority on art appraisal and auctions. With so much information, the ADEC put out a series of pocket-sized guides that people can take with them to auctions to use as a reference when bidding on pieces of art.

The ADEC Art Price Guide was released annually between 1988 and 1997. It is now sold with all 11 guides bundled together. Though you won't typically be able to find these sets in traditional bookstores, online outlets such as eBay.com, Amazon.com and Chapters.Indigo.ca, which is an Amazon-like Canadian website, carry copies from time to time. Because these books are no longer published, most sets may have wear and tear, because they were likely purchased new and used throughout the year by the book's original owner, before being bundled and sold. ADEC put out a few more price indicators between 1998 and 2000, though they are not included in these sets.

These guides contain information regarding the "then-prices" of art, as well as how much similar art pieces were bought and sold for at auctions that year. The completed set contains records on 137,000 artists and pieces. It provides information on 1.1 million auction results, which were registered by 750 auction houses from 40 countries. The guide prints the most pertinent information from the ADEC database, which contains information on all forms of art, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints and drawings. ADEC's database still exists at ArtPrice.com, where consumers can purchase customized reports based on artist, type of art or price range.

On November 25, 2000, ArtBusiness.com noted that the ADEC had been accused of monopolizing the search engine results for art price guides and databases, including on Google, Excite, Direct Hit and Yahoo. They attempted to do this by buying up numerous domain names, which, when entered as web addresses, would funnel surfers to Artprice.com, the site that sells the ADEC Art Price Guide. Though no legal action was taken, websites dedicated to providing consumers with accurate, unbiased information on art appraisals have posted alerts to their consumers about ADEC's practice.