Built by people who had the problem

Galleries and artists do not fall out over commission nearly as often as they fall out over records. Which pieces went where. What condition they left in. What the retail price was meant to be. Who has the one with the chip in the base. Almost all of it is a documentation problem wearing a relationship problem’s clothes.

So the platform is built around the record rather than around the sale. A piece gets catalogued once, properly, and then carries its own history as it moves — consigned, accepted, dispatched, sold, returned. Both the artist and the gallery read the same record, at the same time, which removes most of the argument before it starts.

Nothing you catalogue is public until you say so. Two separate switches control it — one for you, one for each piece — and both are off when you arrive. That is not a setting we happened to default conservatively; it is the position the whole public side of the platform is built on, and it is enforced in the places that serve the pages rather than in the ones that draw them.

A link you create yourself is a different matter, because creating it is a decision you already made. Send a portfolio to a collector and it works. Being put in front of strangers, indexed by search engines and shown beside other artists’ work is the thing you have to actively agree to.

The price a buyer sees is the one you set. What you take home after a gallery’s commission is never published, never in a page a crawler can read, and never returned to anyone who is not you or the gallery holding the piece.

We are Australian, and most of the artists and galleries on the platform are too — which is why the work is browsable by state and by town rather than by continent. Buying original work close to home means you can go and look at it first, collect it without freighting something fragile across the country, and talk to the person who made it.

That said, nothing here is fenced to Australia. Artists elsewhere use it, prices are shown in the artist’s own currency, and a collector anywhere can write to a studio.