Methodology · Hub
How Artmetria Works
Last revised 24 August 2026
Artmetria is built as a method before it is presented as a product. This page is where the method is written down: how a raw record becomes an explainable reading, where a person is responsible and where a machine is, what Artmetria publishes and what it keeps inside the products, and what happens to the standard as the record grows. It claims no certainty the art market does not support — much of that market stays partial, fragmented and hard to compare, and saying so is part of the method rather than a caveat attached to it.
Read this first
A signal, not a verdict.
Artmetria is educational and analytical. It does not authenticate, appraise, predict future value, or give financial advice. Every output is a reading meant to support judgement — read it through its limits.
Technology extends human judgement. It does not replace it. Machines can observe, compare and prioritise; human judgement interprets, decides and takes responsibility. This does not mean every result is reviewed by a person — it means the difference between the two is always kept visible.
- A signal is not a verdict.
- A recommendation is an invitation to explore, not an instruction.
- A limitation is part of responsible interpretation, not a hidden weakness.
Pipeline
From a raw record to an explainable reading
The same seven steps run behind every value. You can follow the process without seeing the proprietary weights — the point is that it is inspectable, not that it is secret.
01
Input
Auction results and a museum-scale reference corpus arrive as raw records — prices, lots, artists, images, provenance lines.
02
Normalisation
Records are cleaned and mapped to a common scale: duplicates removed, currencies and units aligned, artists and mediums reconciled.
03
Qualitative layer
Each object is read against explicit criteria — artist, period, execution, subject, technique and format — not price alone. The framework has ten criteria; which of them a reading draws on depends on what the catalogue recorded. How those criteria are weighted stays proprietary.
04
Aggregation
The per-object readings are composed into a synthetic value and a market reading, so one number reflects many signals rather than a single data point.
05
Coverage & confidence
Every output carries how much data backs it — a coverage state (canonical → insufficient) and a 95% confidence interval — so a thin dataset can't hide behind a confident-looking number.
06
Human review, when applicable
Some results pass through a named review step before publication. Most do not. A result only carries a human-reviewed status when that specific step actually happened for that specific output.
07
Output
An explainable reading — a value, its band and its coverage — meant to inform judgement. Never a verdict, a valuation, or financial advice.
Responsibility
Human review and external expertise
Artmetria distinguishes what a system produced from what a person reviewed or authored. A result is only labelled as human-reviewed when a named step, by an identifiable role, actually took place for that specific output — never as a general assurance applied across the platform.
What Artmetria systems produce
Automated computations (a versioned Index value), automated signals (a prioritisation flag), and AI-generated interpretations (a bounded reading, never a numeric certainty). Each carries its method, its inputs and its limits.
Where a person is responsible
Where a specific output has genuinely passed through a recorded review or was authored by a named person, that status is shown on the result itself — status, reviewer role, date and criteria. Where it hasn't, Artmetria says so rather than implying otherwise.
Some questions stay outside what any system here can settle — attribution, authentication, condition, legal and tax matters remain the domain of qualified external expertise. Artmetria is designed to make the first layers of analysis legible, not to replace that expertise.
Corrections
A result may change when the evidence changes
Sources get corrected, records get enriched, and methods evolve. When they do, an output built on them can change too — that isn't evidence the earlier version was careless, it is what a method built to keep learning looks like.
The Artmetria Index carries this in practice: an experimental period was frozen into a named, dated specification once it stabilised, and any future change to how the value is computed will carry its own version and its own freeze date, visible on the Index Methodology page.
Access to this page, to known limitations and to a way of flagging a possible error is never restricted by plan.
Public and private
What Artmetria publishes, and what it keeps
Artmetria is building one structured record of artists, works and market facts. Two different products are drawn from it: a public one, freely readable, and a private one inside the account. They are not the same product at two depths — the difference is deliberate.
Public. Biographies, chronologies, historical context, original editorial analysis, glossaries, movements, similar artists, aggregated statistics, and a bounded selection of sales — a work sold, when, and a headline result already a matter of public record.
Kept inside Eye. Your personal context and everything drawn from it: what you follow, what you saved, what is recommended to you.
Kept inside Market. Full sale and price history, comparables, scoring, estimates, liquidity, Sleepers, exports and alerts — the analysis built on top of the public fact, rather than the fact itself.
Two gates govern this, and they are not the same gate. Whether a fact can be published depends on its provenance, its rights, its identity resolution and its factual confidence. Whether it can be analysed — scored, compared, valued — is a separate question with a separate answer. A record can be solid enough to state and not yet solid enough to interpret, and Artmetria does not let the first imply the second.
One rule follows from this and is worth stating plainly: a public page has to be worth reading on its own. It may say that Artmetria tracks an artist further inside the products; it may not show a score, a comparable set or a recommendation to make you sign in for it. A page that stops mid-thought at a paywall fails this method as surely as one that gives away what it should not.
As it scales
How the record grows without getting worse
A reference that grows carelessly stops being a reference. So the rules below are published now, before the pages they govern exist — they are the standard Artmetria has set itself, not a description of something already running.
One source, one representation. Public pages are a filtered projection of the same structured record the products read, never a second body of content maintained beside it. One entity has one canonical public representation, referenced the same way on every page that mentions it — which is also what stops a reference site from contradicting itself at scale.
Provenance and confidence travel with every assertion. Automated analysis never creates a fact; it proposes a hypothesis or a candidate, and it is labelled as such. A page that oversells its certainty to sound more authoritative fails this method even if it performs well.
Machine-readable structure describes what is actually there. The structured data behind a page is a truthful description of its contents — never markup implying content, credentials or reviews the page does not genuinely carry.
Volume is an outcome, never a target.Growth is staged, and each stage has to hold the previous stage's quality bar at ten times the size before the next one opens. Generating pages intelligently means the generation itself carries the bar — not that checking is dropped once there is too much to check.
Quality always outranks quantity. No page is published for volume's own sake, at any stage.
The notes
The methodological record, in full
Index
Index Methodology
Understand how Artmetria structures market and object-level signals through a careful analytical framework. Scores are signals, not verdicts, predictions or recommendations.
Coverage
Coverage & Explainability
See how Artmetria distinguishes active coverage, monitored sources, partial data and confidence context. Coverage is part of the method, not a hidden technical detail.
AI
AI Methodology
Learn how Artmetria uses AI as an interpretive assistant for aesthetic profiling, artwork reading, discovery and context - not as an authority, certificate or financial advisor.
Limits
Scope & Limits
Read how Artmetria handles beta status, partial coverage, data limitations, AI uncertainty and responsible use without overclaiming.
Engine
Artmetria Engine
Discover the structured market memory behind Artmetria: the layer that helps organise market context, coverage and uncertainty.
Use the method
Use the result. Keep the method visible.
Explore an artwork on the personal, discovery side of Artmetria, or examine market evidence on the professional side. In both, the aim is the same: keep enough source, context and uncertainty attached for the result to stay inspectable.
Eye
A personal and living relationship with art: Eye discovers things worth your attention, helps you understand what you're looking at, and remembers what you care about — with progressive relevance as you keep using it.
Eye →Reading Room →Artist of the Day →
This stays personal — nothing here transfers automatically into Market's professional research tools.
Market
Read the Index, follow market movement, and review sources with their coverage and limits attached.
Market →Index →AI Laboratory →
This stays professional — nothing here draws automatically from your personal Eye context.