In a move that underscores the growing demand for transparency and data in an opaque industry, art appraiser Winston Art Group and art-tech firm Artory have merged to form the Winston Artory Group (WAG), a new firm offering art appraisal, advisory, and digital collection management services.
The merger is backed by a strategic investment led by Strobe Ventures, with support from CMT Digital, Galaxy Digital, and the family office of Eijk van Otterloo, the company said.
The new firm combines Winston’s longstanding expertise in art valuation with Artory’s blockchain-backed tech infrastructure and database of over 50 million art market transactions. The result, the company says, is a platform capable of delivering secure, defensible, and data-rich valuations to a range of clients—from insurers and banks to family offices and collectors.
But WAG isn’t just promising a better spreadsheet. It’s entering a market environment where value itself is in question. “The market’s tough, there’s no question about it,” Co-Executive Chairman Elizabeth von Habsburg told Bloomberg, which first reported the merger on Tuesday. “You see it with the dealers that are going out of business or deciding not to continue.”
That climate has made appraisals more consequential—and in some cases, more brutal. Von Habsburg recounted a recent case where a print once valued at $1 million was reappraised at just $300,000. “The insurance company loved it,” she said. “The client, maybe not so much.”
According to WAG President Peter Loukas—also to Bloomberg—the firm expects to handle $15 billion in valuations this year, with nearly $9 billion split between bank-financed collections and insurance assessments. The remaining balance includes estate settlements, generational wealth transfers, and direct requests from collectors looking to make sense of what they own.
That last category is less rare than one might expect. “We were called a couple of years ago to look at a schedule review for a pretty major collector,” von Habsburg said. “There was only $3 million worth of value in it. We looked it over… it was really $20 million.”
WAG’s value proposition lies in its access to information few others can see. Unlike auction results, which are public—if often massaged—private sales remain largely hidden. To compensate, WAG compiles price lists ahead of major fairs, tracks what sells, and aggregates nearly a million dealer data points.
“We advise 30 percent of the biggest art collectors in this country,” said Co-Executive Chairman Nanne Dekking. “So every dealer sends information to us because they want us to share that with our clients.”
In other words, Winston Artory isn’t just appraising artworks—it’s appraising the state of the art market itself. And at the moment, the outlook is mixed. Certain categories, like 18th-century sculpture and American paintings, are showing renewed interest. But volume is down, and private sales dominate, complicating price discovery.
Still, the firm isn’t worried about obsolescence. “Death, debt, divorce, disaster,” von Habsburg quipped. “That’s never going to stop.”
