Glossary
The art market and its software both love jargon. Plain definitions, with how each concept shows up in gallery practice.
- Art fair
- A time-boxed commercial event where galleries exhibit and sell from booths — a major sales and logistics moment.
- Artist's proof (AP)
- An impression of an edition reserved for the artist, outside the numbered run.
- Catalogue raisonné
- The scholarly, comprehensive catalog of every known work by an artist.
- Collector engagement
- The observable signals of a collector's interest — visits, dwell time, favorites, opens — used to time and shape follow-up.
- Condition report
- A documented assessment of an artwork's physical state at a point in time.
- Consignment
- An arrangement where a gallery sells a work it doesn't own, remitting the owner an agreed share after sale.
- Consignor statement
- A periodic report to a work's owner covering sales, amounts owed, and works still held.
- Data portability
- The ability to take your complete data out of a platform in a usable, re-importable form.
- Edition
- A set of authorized copies of a work — prints, photographs, casts — each numbered against the set's size.
- Idempotency (API)
- The guarantee that retrying the same API request once or five times has the same effect as making it once.
- Invoice (art sale)
- The sale document requesting payment for a work, carrying the details that later prove the transaction.
- Knowledge-base search (RAG)
- Search that answers questions from your own records — retrieval-augmented generation over gallery data.
- MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- An open protocol that lets AI assistants securely use external tools and data sources — like your gallery platform.
- Offer (private sale)
- A gallery's formal proposal of specific works at specific prices to a specific client.
- Online viewing room
- A curated, often access-controlled web presentation of works for sale, published by a gallery.
- Ownership status
- Whether the gallery owns a work outright, holds it on consignment, or no longer holds it — distinct from whether it's for sale.
- Primary market
- The first sale of a work, typically from the artist via their gallery — as opposed to resales on the secondary market.
- Provenance
- The documented ownership history of an artwork, from the artist's studio to the present holder.
- Registrar
- The role (and record-keeping discipline) responsible for tracking artworks' locations, movements, and documentation.
- Reserve / hold
- A temporary commitment taking a work off active offer while a specific buyer decides.
- Row-level security (RLS)
- Database-enforced access control where each row carries policies deciding who can read or write it.
- Tearsheet
- A one-page presentation of a single work — image, details, price — sent to a prospective buyer.
- Webhook
- A platform-to-you HTTP callback that fires when something happens, so your systems stay current without polling.
- White-label
- Presenting software under your own brand and domain, with the vendor invisible.