The money is
already there
Every piece here is offered at a price, with the money to buy it back sitting in the contract the whole time. Buy it and change your mind, and you hand it back for that money. No draw, no odds, no ticket.
The number to watch is not the price. It is how far above the buy-back money the price sits. Ask close to it and you can change your mind cheaply; ask far above it and most of what you pay is at risk. Every card below says which it is, and what you would keep if you handed the work back the same day. The arithmetic, and how it compares with the room we published a critique of, is at the pulse page.
What this is a version of
A guarantee, opened up
When a work goes to auction with a guarantee, somebody has agreed in advance to buy it at a set price if nobody else does. They are paid for that, whether or not it happens. It is the oldest way to put a floor under a picture, it works, and it works quietly on the most expensive nights of the year.
It has one property that every attempt to rebuild it on a computer has missed. The person standing behind the price is almost always a collector of that artist. Being wrong means they end up owning something they wanted.
Every version built for the internet put somebody else there instead. Lenders who wanted a return and not the picture, so when the loans went bad nobody bid for the collateral. Funds that held a share of an object rather than the object, and then had nobody to sell it to. Standing offers that applied to any piece in a collection, which is to say to no piece in particular, and which were handed the worst one every time until whoever posted them stopped.
Money that does not want the object cannot hold a bid on the object.
That is a decade in one line, and it is the only thing this room is really testing. Which is why the money behind every piece here belongs to the person who put the work up: they are content owning it, because they already do.
Whether somebody would take that position on a work they do not own is the open question. There is nowhere on this page to do it yet, and finding out whether anyone wants to is worth more to us than another mechanism would be.
Why not just buy it elsewhere
Everywhere else sells you an ask
If you are buying
A price on a marketplace is what someone wants for a piece. It is not money, and it disappears the moment they change their mind. There is no offer standing under the specific work you own, at any price, on most days.
Here you pay a little more and the way out is already funded. Buy a piece asking exactly what is set aside behind it and you are paying the house cut for the right to hand it back and keep the rest, any day before the term ends.
Whether that is worth it depends entirely on the spread, which is why it is on every card and not in a footnote.
If you made the work
A resale royalty is a request. Marketplaces honour it when they feel like it, and most have stopped. An artist sells once and watches the rest happen without them.
Keep a few copies of an edition and post them here as the side that is for sale, and you are paid out of every trade that passes through your price range, for as long as it does. Nobody has to agree to it. It is taken at the moment the work changes hands, by the same arithmetic that moves it.
Not a royalty, then. A position. The difference is that nobody can decline to pay it.
And the part that argues against us
Your protection and the seller's profit come out of the same number. Priced level with the money behind it, the exit is excellent and the seller earns nothing on a round trip, so nobody will price it there for long. Every step up moves value from your protection to their margin. There is no setting where both sides do well, and that is the trade rather than a flaw we have not fixed yet.
This also only works for editions. A one-of-one has nothing to trade against, so what you would get is a single price and no market underneath it. That is the harder half and it is unsolved.
Elsewhere has everyone on it, needs no new contract to trust, and lets you make an offer. Here you cannot: only the person who put the work up sets the buy-back price. If you want to be the money under someone else's picture, there is nowhere to stand yet.
Nothing is deployed
This room is wired and inert. It goes live when an address is set, and it has never pointed at a public network. The contracts behind it are written and tested and cleared for nothing.