Artlogic manages; artbitrage speaks — the free reference & computation layer for auction houses and galleries
The art trade runs on numbers that live in prose: premium bands buried in Conditions-of-Business PDFs, royalty caps in statutory instruments, licensing thresholds frozen in 2002, provenance chains punctuated by conventions three institutions remember differently. This room turns those numbers into machine-readable, source-cited, honestly-labeled data — no keys, no database, no funds, no take-rate. Every figure carries its source URL, its effective date, and a truth status. What the desk cannot verify, it says so.
Because a cataloguer comparing a $3 m hammer across three houses is doing tax arithmetic from PDFs, and gets a different answer than her colleague. Because "sold" is not a boolean — settlement is a lifecycle, and half of top-tier lots in some markets never finish it. Because the resale-right royalty is the most mechanical calculation in the trade and the UK quietly changed its currency basis in 2024. Because every incumbent sells either a silo or a toll booth, and the one legally safe, structurally unserved position is the free, open, cited reference layer — which is what ARTBITRAGE already is.
Every number below was verified against primary sources — the houses' own Conditions of Business, legislation.gov.uk, the Arts Council's own tables — before it was allowed in. Conflicting sources ship as contested, with both citations. Not a bug, a design.
all-in buyer cost, marginal band math, schedule cited
artist's resale right — bands, cap, collecting society
which licensing & compliance gates does this object cross
paste a provenance paragraph — semicolon means the work passed directly
The first machine-readable rate cards anywhere. Bands are marginal — each rate applies to its portion of the hammer, exactly as the Conditions of Business phrase it. Effective dates matter: the majors changed rates three times in 2024–2026.
At the major houses the five-year authenticity warranty covers only the unqualified heading. Every qualifier below the top rung — "Attributed to", "Studio of", "Circle of" — is a graded step away from certainty, and carries no warranty. The ladder, as data:
Everything on this page is one curl away — plus the desks that only make sense machine-to-machine: lot validation with a CSV door shaped to the Artlogic export vocabulary (living-party columns deliberately ignored), and voluntary results submission with witness receipts. Nothing is stored; nothing needs a key.
The determination behind this room — the market research, the withdrawn lots, the red lines — is TRADE-MODULE.md. The verbatim endpoint contracts live at /api/trade.