Standards of Practice
Advising is an unlicensed business. Anyone can call themselves an art advisor, and plenty of people take money from both sides of a purchase without ever mentioning it. So here is exactly how we work, written down, in public. These are the rules we hold ourselves to on every acquisition.
Our Commitments
We never sell, hold inventory, or take a piece on consignment. We are not dealers and we do not run a fund. On any purchase, you are the only person we are working for.
We are paid by our client and nobody else. No kickback from a gallery, no finder’s fee from a dealer, no cut of the buyer’s premium, and no keeping a trade discount we negotiated in your name. If a seller offers us money, the answer is no, and we tell you they asked.
You know the number before there is a piece on the table. The full schedule is published on our pricing page, and it does not move after the hammer falls.
You pay the auction house, gallery, or seller directly, and we invoice our work separately. If a specific sale requires us to act as the registered bidder, we agree to that in writing in advance, for that sale only.
If we have a relationship with a seller, or anything else that could reasonably affect our judgment, you hear about it in writing before you decide. If we cannot act purely in your interest on a given purchase, we say so and step back.
Every piece gets the same work: chain of ownership, condition assessed on the actual object, and verification appropriate to the category. If we cannot get comfortable with a piece’s history, we tell you to walk, even when walking costs us the fee.
Sales and use tax, import and export, reporting obligations. If a client or a seller asks us to structure a purchase to dodge something, we decline the transaction.
Where These Come From
The Association of Professional Art Advisors is the closest thing this field has to a professional standard. Their code of ethics is essentially the list above: no inventory, no consignment, no acting as a private dealer, compensation from a single source per transaction, full written disclosure of conflicts, real provenance research, and lawful practice. We modeled our standards on theirs.
We are not a member, and we want to be direct about that. Membership requires five years operating as a principal of your own advisory firm, plus a recommendation to their board. We have not been doing this for five years. We intend to apply when we qualify.
Until then we operate by those rules anyway, because they describe how this should work, not because anyone is checking. You can read APAA's code of ethics on their site.
Accountability
A page of promises is worth what you can check. Ask us where our fee is coming from on any purchase, and ask us what we passed on and why. If we ever fall short of anything written here, email jacob@prosperstreetcurators.com and say so directly.
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