The art market has taught itself to whisper. Prices are 'on request.' Provenance is 'available for serious buyers.' Methodology is 'proprietary.' Each of those phrases has the same translation: we do not want you to compare.
We built Gavelia because we think the mid-market does not need another marketplace. It needs a decision layer — a single place where a valuation arrives with its own footnotes, where every comparable is linked, and where the fee is printed on the homepage before you ask about it.
This is the first of what we will call the Gavelia Quarterly — an editorial imprint written in the voice of a conservator's report rather than a press release. We will publish our methodology in the open. We will publish our fees in the open. When the valuations we give turn out to be wrong, we will publish that too, broken out by segment.
If that sounds slow, it is. Slow is the point.