The contemporary art market runs on intermediation. By the time a work reaches the collector who buys it, three or four people have usually taken a margin: the artist's gallery, the secondary dealer, the buyer's advisor, the auction house. Each layer adds cost. Each layer adds opacity. Each layer slows the work to its eventual home.
This was once defensible. Information was scarce. Trust was hard to establish at distance. Galleries vouched for artists, dealers vouched for works, advisors vouched for sellers. The intermediaries earned their margins by reducing the risk of buying art from people you did not know.
That defence no longer holds. Information is no longer scarce. Trust can be established directly, verified by phone, secured by reputation, and maintained by ordinary platform discipline. Most of the chain is now legacy. The cost remains. The opacity remains. The slowness remains. The justification does not.
The chain is the cost. Removing it is the product.
Bypart compresses the market to its irreducible minimum: a buyer, a seller, and the work between them. No advisor in the middle, no auction premium, no commission on the sale.
We are not opposed to galleries, dealers, or advisors. They do useful work and many of them do it well. But the structure of the market currently makes their participation compulsory rather than chosen. A collector who already knows the artist they want should be able to talk to that artist. A dealer with a serious work should be able to reach a serious collector without paying a percentage to whoever is sitting between them.
Bypart provides the channel. The relationship is yours.
Founder bios will appear here. Contact details, brief background, why each of us is qualified to build this. We will publish these once the company is formally incorporated.
Built in London. Available worldwide on the iOS App Store. Customer support in English at this stage; additional languages on the roadmap.