irisindex.com

What It Is

Iris Index is an index site for the contemporary art auction market. Its core focus is ranking the Top 500 “living contemporary artists” based on hammer prices plus buyer’s premium from global auction houses over the past 3 years. It is not SEO software in the traditional sense, but rather a niche industry data source that can support art-market content marketing, topic research, artist popularity tracking, and educational content.

Core Features and Data

The site displays fields such as artist ranking, name, country of birth, year of birth, sale price, pre-sale estimate, auction house, auction date, and ranking movement. Users can browse ranking ranges such as 1–99 and 100–199, and sort by surname, auction house, entry date, country of birth, and date of birth. Supported currencies include GBP, USD, CHF, and EUR, making it easier to compare auction data across regions. The content states that the data comes from global auction houses and covers the Top 500 living contemporary artists, but it does not explain the specific collection process, update frequency, verification mechanism, or full data licensing sources.

Pricing and Channels

The captured text does not disclose any paid plans, subscription pricing, enterprise version, or free trial information. The page only mentions that users can subscribe to receive updates on global contemporary art auction records, connect via Twitter or Facebook, and use a Contact entry point. As a result, its business model and level of customer support are difficult to assess.

Pros and Cons

Its strengths are its strong vertical focus and easy-to-understand data fields, making it suitable for quickly reviewing high-value auction records and market rankings for artists. Multi-currency support and multi-dimensional sorting also improve basic lookup efficiency. Its limitations include the lack of common marketing/SEO capabilities such as an API, export options, bulk filtering, charts, trend analysis, keyword data, or search traffic data. Its data methodology is also not very transparent, and there is no visible support for team collaboration, permission management, or third-party integrations.

Who It’s For and Access from China

It is better suited to art collectors, galleries, auction researchers, art media editors, educational institutions, and marketing teams that need art-market content material. The source text provides no information about access from mainland China, so this remains unknown; payment methods are also not disclosed. If a more comprehensive art-market database is required, alternatives such as Artnet Price Database, Artprice, MutualArt, and Artsy may be worth comparing.