Conditions of sale

Currency

Prices are quoted and charged in US dollars. Statutory thresholds below are expressed in euros, because they derive from EU law tied to where the gallery is established, not from the currency you pay in.

Registration

Bidding requires an approved registration with a payment card on file. The card is authenticated when it is saved and is not charged to place a bid. No card, no bidding — this is what keeps the ladder honest.

We may set a limit on the total you can bid, and may decline or withdraw a registration without giving a reason. For lots at or above €10,000 we are required to verify your identity before the sale completes.

A bid is binding

Placing a bid is an offer to buy at that price. If yours is the highest bid when the lot closes and the reserve has been met, you have bought the work. Bids cannot be retracted.

Every bid is validated on our server: the amount must meet the published increment, the lot must still be open by server time, and the identical request sent twice is recorded once. The clock that matters is ours, not your device’s.

Reserve

Each lot carries a confidential reserve. The lot page shows whether the reserve has been met; it never shows the figure. If bidding closes below the reserve, the work is not sold and no contract is formed.

Soft close

A bid placed in the final two minutes extends the lot by two minutes, and keeps extending on every late bid. Sniping does not work here — you cannot win by arriving one second before the end.

Extensions are capped by a published hard closing time. The lot cannot run indefinitely, and both times are shown on the lot page.

Settlement

• Lots below €5,000. The registered card is charged when the lot closes. If your bank requires you to authenticate the payment, we email a secure link and you have 48 hours to complete it.

• Lots at or above €5,000. We invoice you and settle by bank transfer. Payment is due within 7 days, and the work is released on cleared funds.

The hammer price is the price. We do not add a buyer’s premium. Shipping is quoted separately as set out under shipping & insurance.

If a winning bidder does not pay

If payment is not completed within the window above, we may cancel the sale, offer the work to the underbidder at their final bid, retain any registration deposit, and decline future registrations. Where a deposit was taken, it may be applied against our costs.

Records

Every bid — accepted and rejected — is recorded with its server timestamp. If there is a dispute about timing, that record is what we rely on, and we will share the relevant part of it with you.

Consumer rights

Nothing here removes rights you have under EU/EEA consumer law. An online timed auction does not generally qualify as a “public auction” for those purposes, so your withdrawal rights may still apply — see returns.

Sales are governed by the law of [JURISDICTION]. Seller: [COMPANY NAME], [REGISTERED ADDRESS], [ORG/VAT NO].