Method
How every figure here is made.
01Every number carries its method
A price says whether it is hammer, with fees or all-in, gives the currency and the sale date, and names its source. There is no bare number on this site, and the data files will not validate if one appears.
02Sources stay separate
House totals are never averaged into one index. Where reports disagree, both are published with their sources and the difference is explained.
03Refusals are shown
A price on request, a withdrawn lot, a private sale or an unconfirmed rate appears as a refusal. Missing data never looks like zero, and the calculator will not render an unconfirmed rate as a figure.
04Attention is not value
The attention instrument measures who people are reading about, never what is worth buying. Views lag one to two days and are stamped to the day they cover.
05Our words, your outlets
Headlines and summaries are original. Publisher headlines are never shown as ours, paywalled bodies are never fetched, and every outlet is linked.
06The crawler is honest
It identifies itself and obeys robots.txt. Open robots.txt is not permission on its own: a host whose terms forbid automated reading is refused too, and every refusal is published on the crawler page. A site that will not serve an honest bot gets its figures from its press office instead — we do not change the header to get in.
07The wall is visible
The owner of this publication is an art dealer. The gallery's own works never appear in the Tape, the Record Book or the attention instrument.
What we refuse to do
- No rate is rendered without its effective_from date and its source.
- An unconfirmed rate is never shown as a number in a calculator. It is shown as 'reported as X, unconfirmed' or not at all.
- This table does not compute what a reader will pay on a specific lot. It shows the published card and the arithmetic; VAT on the hammer under the margin scheme, shipping, insurance and import VAT are out of scope and the page says so.
- No valuations of individual works, and no price-history database.
- No indices, no “art as investment” signals, nothing that implies prices will rise.
- No reproduction of copyrighted artwork. Public-domain works from CC0 museum sources only; everything else is a credited link. Film posters, anime and game art are held studio IP and are always link-only.
Corrections
Every correction is published within 24 hours, with what was wrong, what it is now and when it changed. A publication whose claim is that figures carry their method has to show its own.