About

We once sold a painting for four million won and the artist took home about two. Both of us knew that going in, and neither number was written anywhere the buyer could see. That gap is most of what I ended up wanting to write about.

I sold work for a small contemporary gallery in Korea for a few years. I photographed it, wrote the listings, answered the emails and said the prices out loud, which is a different job from having opinions about prices. You learn what a number is made of by being the one who has to defend it to somebody standing in front of the work.

What gets written here

Artists, one at a time. Not a career summary, which you can get from any gallery page, but the auction record read properly: what it actually supports, where it goes quiet, and why a median that rises 89 percent does not mean the market rose 89 percent. This is the slow part of the site. The Lee Bae piece took four years of hammer prices before the first sentence, and I would rather publish four of those a year than forty of anything else.

Around that, the mechanics. What separates a silkscreen from an offset print and why the gap is not decorative. How consignment works. What a price has already been through by the time you see it. If a selling platform is worth writing about I will write about it, but ranking marketplaces is a genre with enough people in it already.

Nothing here assumes you are new at this. Someone on their fifth purchase still has to ask what an edition of 200 does to resale, because it is not an obvious question. Terms get defined once and then the piece moves on.

A few things I will not do

No investment advice. An auction record tells you what already happened to other people, and I am suspicious of anyone who reads it as a forecast. If a piece ever starts sounding like a tip, I have gone wrong somewhere.

When I am writing from research rather than from something I handled, the piece says so where it matters instead of hedging everywhere. When I get something wrong, the correction stays visible on the page. That has already happened once and it was embarrassing, which is roughly the point.

Every article naming a living artist has to declare what connects me to them before the site will build. So far the answer has always been nothing.

Contact

Corrections, questions, tips. Also fine: an email from someone about to spend real money who wants a second pair of eyes on it. gallery.lett@gmail.com