About
Fifty-seven inches is the height every museum hangs a painting at, the centre of the work, at the average person’s eye level. It is the one measurement the art world agrees on. This site is about everything it doesn’t tell you.
Most English-language writing about buying art online falls into two piles. One is affiliate sites run by people who have never sold a painting. The other is marketing from the platforms themselves. Both are written from outside the transaction.
This is written from inside it. For a few years I ran online sales for a small contemporary gallery in Korea. I photographed the work, wrote the listings, answered the inquiries and quoted the prices, which means I have seen the commission splits, the consignment terms, the pieces that sat in storage for a year and the conversations that follow. Almost none of that appears in buyer-facing writing, because the people doing that writing have never had to handle any of it.
What this covers
- Buying Guides. Authenticity, certificates, budgets, shipping and customs. What to check before you pay.
- Platform Reviews. Saatchi Art, Artfinder, Singulart, Artsy and the rest. Fees, shipping times, return policies, and who each one is actually for.
- Living With Art. Size, hanging height, framing. The part that happens after the crate arrives.
- From the Gallery Floor. How pricing and consignment work from the selling side. No affiliate links in this section, ever.
How this site makes money
Some articles contain affiliate links. If you buy through one, this site earns a commission at no additional cost to you. Every article that carries them says so at the top, before the first link. That is an FTC requirement in the US and it is enforced in this site’s build, not left to memory.
It does not change what gets recommended. Where a platform is the wrong choice for a given buyer, that is what the article says. The gallery-floor section carries no affiliate links at all, so there is at least one part of the site where the incentive question does not arise.
What this is not
This is not investment advice. Nothing here should be read as a claim that a work will appreciate, and no article recommends buying art as an asset. Buy things you want to live with.
I have not bought from every platform reviewed here, and where a piece is written from research rather than from using the thing, the piece says so in its own words. Where a judgement turns out to be wrong, the correction stays on the page rather than replacing the original quietly.
Contact
Corrections, questions and tips: gallery.lett@gmail.com