Reese H.
Filing a Police Report
The company is AWFUL. If the art didn't sell itself they'd be out of business in a week's time. My first experience with Artsy began last November where we approached Artsy hoping to have our work listed. We sell artwork on consignment for various estates in the area and ultimately we were told we were not a fit due to the ambiguous provenance of some of the work. Fine, no problem, completely understandable. Fast forward to May of this year and Artsy reaches out to us! Not one but two of their sales agents reached out saying they saw our website and would love to have us on the platform. I thoroughly explained that we've been through this all before but I was assured the first person I worked with didn't do their due diligence in trying to get us approved, I even was asked to submit three pieces with varying levels of provenance to see if we would be a fit and were told by an Artsy employee that all were perfect fits and she eagerly signed us up for the $900 a month package, a major selling point of which was having an account executive who could help us out at a moments notice, better yet she was a specialist in the secondary market! Enter another Artsy employee. I immediately get an email from her saying she's going on vacation for a week but that she's looking forward to scheduling a call to get us started when she returns. Two weeks go by with no word so I send her an email asking to schedule the meeting and she lets me know she's been out sick. Ok, fine, but that needs to be communicated when we're over here burning $225 a week and don't have any idea how to use the platform effectively. We finally get on a zoom call with her and get a good plan of action going, however progressing with that plan hinged on us sending another Artsy employee a list of our artists, and she would recommend which artists to start with. My archivist sent her that list before the day was out, and another week goes by with no response. I ask my archivist to follow up with her, he does, and still no word for over a week. We've completely wasted our first $900 at this point. I had one piece listed for sale as a practice run, well we got a great offer on it! I accepted the offer but the customer needed to contact her card company to let the charge through which she does and lets me know to re-run it. When I go to do so the piece has been delisted, so I post it again, and it gets taken down. I get an email from the Artsy support team saying that due to the ambiguous provenance they can't allow the sale to go through. ***Major false advertisement from Artsy employee*** So I email them stating there was false advertisement on their part and that we should be refunded. We have a zoom meeting with the associate director of second market dealers. The meeting was cordial enough and Artsy agreed the best path forward was to close our account and refund our money. One of the people in the meeting was tasked with reaching out to us with details of the refund. If Artsy is one thing, they are consistent. Consistently lying about reaching out. That meeting was Monday June 6th, and as of Tuesday June 28th not only has NO ONE from Artsy reached out about ANYTHING, but we've also been billed a total of $2700. We're filing a police report if we don't have concrete evidence of the refund coming our way by the end of the week. You've really pissed off the retired, and quite litigious owner of the company. He just told me if he has to fly across the country from his summer home to file the report he'll also be filing a lawsuit.
Response from ArtsyJul 13, 2022
Hi Reese, Thank you for your review. We are sorry to hear about your experience with joining the platform. After you were onboarded, your artworks were reviewed by our Catalog Team and concerns were raised on the history of some of the artworks. Artsy takes matters of authenticity seriously and we cannot allow works to be listed unless our Catalog Team is satisfied with the information provided by you. As a result, it was mutually agreed that the partnership would not move forwards, and all subscription payments would be returned to you. We apologize for the delay in your refunds being processed, we do appreciate that this took longer than necessary, and we have reviewed our internal process to ensure that something like this does not happen again. At the time of writing this response I can confirm that all of your subscription payments have been refunded to you. I hope that this resolves the matter, but please do reach out to our team if there is anything else that we can help you with.




