Platform · Voice
A voice is a discipline. The discipline is written down.
The architecture speaks to clients on behalf of institutions that have spent years building reputations on what they say and how they say it. A wrong word in a documentation packet, a sales-flavoured phrase in a provenance summary, a guarantee where no guarantee can be made — any of these damages something that took decades to build.
The voice is documented. The rules are short, specific, and applied consistently. This page is the public version of that document.
Said this. Not that.
Used
- provenance research
- attribution opinion (from a named expert)
- indicated market range based on comparable sales
- sourced documentation
- documented chain of custody
- artwork, work, piece
- collector, client, principal
- verified, sourced, documented
Banned
- authentication / authenticated
- appraisal / appraised / valuation
- certified / guarantee / guaranteed
- luminous / evocative / stunning
- captures the / celebrates / invites the viewer
- product / SKU / item
- customer / user / lead
- leverage / synergy / cutting-edge
The right-hand list is not banned because the words are bad in themselves. It is banned because each word has a specific legal, technical, or rhetorical meaning that the architecture should not casually assert. "Authentication" is a legal claim with consequences; "attribution opinion" is what is actually being offered. "Appraisal" is a regulated act; "indicated market range based on comparable sales" is what the records actually support.
Four rules for everything written.
Every claim cites a source
If a claim cannot be tied to a source — a publication, an artist communication, a museum record, a verifiable communication, a documented sale — the claim is either rewritten until it can or removed. "Sourced documentation" is the standard, not the exception.
Specific over general
"The piece was exhibited at MoMA in the 2019 retrospective" is preferred to "the piece has been exhibited internationally." "Range: $42,000 — $58,000 based on three sales of comparable works in 2024 and 2025" is preferred to "estimate available on inquiry." Specificity is the point.
No marketing intensifiers
"Important," "significant," "remarkable," "exceptional," "transformative" — all removed. The work is what it is. The records describe it. The reader judges. The architecture does not push.
No artist's words without artist's approval
Any statement attributed to a represented artist — about their own work, their own intentions, their own history — is approved by the artist before publication. Disputes are recorded. Corrections are dated. Nothing is silently overwritten.
The voice is a defense, not a style.
A gallery's reputation is built on what it says and how it says it over decades. A vendor that writes in marketing language and asserts authentication where it should offer attribution opinion will damage that reputation the first time something needs to hold up in legal context.
The voice rules exist because the architecture writes on behalf of institutions, and the institutions cannot afford the kind of language that sounds normal in a software product but signals carelessness in a working market.