Issuing an attribution statement

WHAT AN ATTRIBUTION STATEMENT IS

Attribution statements are open to galleries, museums and auction houses — the Marcus decree binds them identically. A theatre or a library does not see them.

It is your dated declaration about a work, recorded in a register nobody can rewrite, and readable by your buyer at a single address. The document says who issues it, what it declares, and when.

It does not say that the platform examined the work — the platform never examines anything. The document carries that sentence in full: « This document records a declaration by its issuer; it does not constitute an independent expert appraisal. »

THE WORDING IS THE LEGAL ACT

French decree no. 81-255 of 3 March 1981 — the Marcus decree — fixes the meaning of every phrase used in the art trade. You pick yours from a closed list of seven, and the screen keeps reminding you what each one commits you to:

• « by » (art. 3) — you warrant the author.
• « attributed to » (art. 4) — a strong presumption, not a warranty: the uncertainty passes to the buyer.
• « studio of » (art. 5) — made in the studio, during the master's lifetime.
• « school of » (art. 6) — a pupil, or an artist under notorious influence, during the master's lifetime or less than fifty years after their death.
• « period » (art. 2) — the era, not the hand.
• « in the taste of » (art. 7) — no warranty of author, period or school.
• « reproduction » (art. 9) — a copy, declared as such.

THE NUMBERING, AND WHY IT IS NOT PUBLIC

Every statement receives a number CERT-YEAR-NNNNN, private to your house, allocated by the server at the moment of issue. The series has no gaps: a preview consumes no number, and a failure mid-issue rolls everything back, counter included.

That number never appears on the public page. A running number on a public address would tell anyone who can count how many works you sell and at what pace. The public page carries a twelve-character code drawn at random, with no order and no meaning.

WHAT CAN NO LONGER BE CHANGED

An issued statement is not corrected. That is the price of the fingerprint: the document is frozen at issue, and its fingerprint is chained to the previous one. Being able to touch it up would be being able to rewrite history.

If you made a mistake, you revoke and you issue a new document. Revocation keeps the public page online, marked « Revoked », with the reason you write. It does not touch the chain.

Before issuing, a check stops you if your house's identity is incomplete: the public name and the town go into the fingerprint and will never be correctable. The screen tells you which of the two is missing.