Blog.

A self-initiated identity for a museum of things nobody threw away, built on one registrar's object: the tag.

Seven panels of the Ghent Altarpiece are currently photographs, and the cathedral says so. Five conservation cases, and what they know about versioning that software does not.

Paul Delaroche never said painting was dead. What he actually wrote, in the document that went to the French legislature, was that the daguerreotype is an immense service rendered to the arts. And then the miniaturists were destroyed.

An AI image won first prize at the Colorado State Fair in 2022 and set off four years of institutions writing down what they think authorship is. Washington, Beijing and Seoul reached three different answers from the same facts.

Mercator's title says the map was built for navigation. Everything it is blamed for is the price of that. A projection has no errors, only a budget it spends somewhere.

Six buttons, all working correctly, and not one of them gave me the thing. A person does not evaluate your pipeline. They evaluate the moment they tried to use the thing.

Two days spent trying to talk myself out of my own product by comparing it honestly to the best alternative. The surviving claim is narrower and much more defensible.

An NFT contains a URL, not an image. Museums solved the infinite-copy problem twenty years earlier, with contracts. A history of digital art being refused, from 1965 to the 266 monitors MMCA could not save.

A visual reset that threw out an aesthetic I had said I liked. One colour reserved for the person's own marks, which the system never uses to talk about itself.

Two claims were in my documents for months and both were false on a phone. A narrow window is not a phone: responsive layout is a claim about composition, never about input.

A plain text box that may be worth more than everything else in the product. Every archive has this hole: the artefact survives and the reason evaporates.

Six things to check before the artwork itself: provenance, who signed the certificate, condition, edition, the total rather than the hammer, and what happens in Korea when you sell.

Fifteen exhibitions in five years, three volumes of letters, about two hundred paintings released over thirty four years. Posthumous fame is not weather. It is labour, and it has names.

On 15 June 2022 New York deleted the rules that governed its auction houses. A look at what is settled before a lot comes up, and at the 72.9 percent of evening sale volume that is now guaranteed in advance.

Why this product never shows you a date, what that trade actually costs, and the bug where sixty-five things spread over two months all read “just now.”

A write returned success and wrote zero rows. The question I now ask of every assertion: if the implementation were broken, would this test actually fail?

The accepted Rembrandt corpus went from 614 paintings to 146 and back to 340, with no painting discovered or destroyed. Who decides that a work is genuine, and what happens when they change their mind.

I built one question into the product, saw it on screen, and removed it the same day. Which questions are allowed, which are banned, and what you give up.