About
What this is
A working description of the primary art market: what a gallery does that a shop does not, how a price is arrived at, what a fair booth costs, and where a work is between one wall and the next.
Most writing about the art market is about money at the top of it. This publication is about the mechanism underneath: consignment, the split, the reserve, the crate, the customs form. The trade runs on a small vocabulary of arrangements, and once you can read them, the behaviour of the people in it stops looking mysterious.
How it is filed
Entries are filed by the stage of the transaction they belong to rather than by artist, period or medium. A work is made, consigned, priced, shown, crated, stored, sold and — eventually — resold by someone the artist never met. The six sections follow that order, and the index is the trade's own language: ex works, nail to nail, temporary admission, reserve.
What it is not
This site is not affiliated with, and is not, any art fair, gallery, dealer, auction house or advisory service. It carries no listings, no dates, no exhibitor information and no stand bookings. It publishes no valuations and no price guides, and nothing on it is advice on buying or selling. Named galleries, fairs and auction houses are described factually and are never spoken for.
Corrections
Where a figure or a mechanism is described wrongly we would rather know. Write to the desk and it gets fixed in the entry, not in a footnote.