Where did the work go

At ZONA MACO in Mexico City, one of the largest art fairs in Latin America, hundreds of works change hands in a few days. What struck me there is not what gets sold, but what happens afterwards. Often nothing. The gallery sells a work and loses sight of it.

That sounds strange for a market built on provenance. But it is the norm. The moment a work leaves the door, the record stops. Who owns it now, where it hangs, whether it has been resold, usually the gallery does not know. The chain breaks at exactly the point where it would be worth the most.

Why this is more than bookkeeping

Provenance is not a formality. It is what gives a work its history, and so its value. A painting without a trail is a painting without a story. For the artist, the broken chain means no royalty on resale. For the collector, it means uncertainty about what they actually own.

I am building infrastructure to keep that chain intact. But beneath the technology there is a habit. We record precisely how something comes into being, and then forget to follow where it goes. That holds for art. It holds for much more.