The market layer
Auction activity and comparable records, normalised so that currencies, dates and units can honestly be set beside one another. What the market did, stated as what it is: a record, not a verdict.
Artmetria · Market
The Index
A structured, versioned reading of the market — built so that a comparison or a figure can be traced back to what it rests on.
The Index is Market's instrument, not a product of its own: works, artists, sales, catalogues and the relationships between them, structured so a signal can be followed back to its sources. It reads the market quantitatively and qualitatively at once, and it never stands in for judgment.
I
What it reads
Two layers, kept apart.
Price alone answers a narrow question. The Index keeps a second layer beside it, and keeps the two distinguishable — which is what lets a reading be argued with rather than merely believed.
The qualitative layer
Each object read against explicit criteria — artist, period, execution, subject, technique and format — so that two works with the same result are not assumed to be the same case. The framework below names ten; which of them a given reading draws on depends on what the catalogue recorded about that object.
II
The qualitative framework
C1 — C10
Ten criteria, named. You can hold a work against them yourself, and disagree with a reading on a specific ground rather than in general.
- C1Artist identity
- C2Period / dating
- C3Quality of execution
- C4Subject / iconography
- C5Composition
- C6Technique / support
- C7Format / scale
- C8Condition
- C9Provenance
- C10Bibliography & critical resonance
How those criteria are weighted stays proprietary. Naming them is the disclosure that makes a reading inspectable; publishing their weights would not make it more so.
Methodology · Artmetria Index · C1–C10
Ten criteria used to read a work with more discipline.
The public model below illustrates the expert logic that supports the qualitative reading layer. These criteria do not replace the market. They make the market reading less blind by giving a disciplined way to assess the lots that compose it.
In Artmetria’s logic, the market index and the expert framework are not two separate worlds. The first measures movement. The second helps interpret the quality of what is moving.
That is why the Index is not just “a number”. It is an interface between data and judgment.
Visual model
A balanced C1–C10 reading.
This diagram is intentionally schematic. It does not show a real score for a specific object. It simply helps explain how the ten criteria form one coherent reading system.
Click a criterion on the radar or in the carousel below to focus the reading on one dimension of the framework.
Active criterion · C1
Focus
C1 · Artist identity
Historical position, institutional recognition, visibility in collections, specialist literature, and depth of market structure.
The ten criteria
III
How much stands behind it
A figure is never published bare.
Every reading carries how much evidence supports it — its coverage, and a stated confidence. A thin dataset cannot present itself with the authority of a well-covered one, and where the record is too sparse to read, the Index says so instead of producing a number anyway.
How coverage is stated →IV
In practice
Where it stops
An instrument, and only that.
Not a valuation
It does not say what a work is worth.
Not a forecast
It does not say what a work will be worth.
Not a recommendation
Artmetria gives no investment advice, at any plan.
Not an attribution
It authenticates nothing and attributes nothing.
The best description of it remains the plainest: an interface between data and judgment. It is built to be argued with.
Where it is used
Inside Market,
never beside it.
The Index is not sold on its own, because it is not a product on its own. It is the instrument that makes Market's research legible.