Hans Neuendorf had already built a storied career as an art dealer by the late 1980s, helping to bring Pop art from the United States to Germany, co-founding the first-ever art fair (Art Cologne), and putting his resources behind homegrown star-to-be Georg Baselitz when the artist was still roundly dismissed. 

But nothing Neuendorf did earlier changed the art market as drastically or irreversibly as when he founded Artnet in 1989, on the belief that a shared database of the prices achieved by artworks at auction would bring transparency and newfound efficiency to the opaque, antiquated art market.

Today, as we know, the once-quaint art business has evolved into a global art industry. Even as purists continue to cry out that any thought toward money destroys the bridge art can build to transcendence, data-driven art flippers chase astronomical returns on investment, as if paintings were just a prettier asset class—and none of it would have been possible without Artnet’s data. 

Is this what Neuendorf had in mind? And either way, how have the past three decades at the helm of Artnet altered his viewpoint on where the art market might go in the next 30 years? Artnet News editor-in-chief Andrew Goldstein sat down with Neuendorf to find out these answers and much more.