LONDON — Regardless of whether you’re a multibillion-dollar investment banker, or someone who wants to spend just a few hundred on something nice to hang on the wall, it’s difficult not to be intimidated by the art market.

But surely the digital revolution has brought some much-needed transparency to this most opaque of luxury businesses? Presumably, by now, paintings and drawings are being bought online as routinely as music and books?

If only. Last year’s Hiscox Online Art Trade Report (this year’s edition will be published in April) estimated that online platforms accounted for about $3.75 billion of sales in 2016, representing just an 8.4 percent share of the overall market total. The previous year, it had been 7.4 percent, according to the report.

Even so, every month seems to bring new developments in the art world’s digital sector. On Tuesday, for example, it was announced that the online auction house Paddle8 had merged with a Swiss tech company, The Native, and would create an auction that accepts bitcoin, a virtual currency. On Thursday, Sotheby’s said it had bought Thread Genius, a startup specializing in taste-based image recognition and recommendation technologies