How it works
One house. Everything in its place.
The Spine keeps the works, the people, the papers and the journeys of an art house in one system, where each thing knows what it belongs to.
It lives in your own WordPress.
The Spine is a WordPress plugin. It installs on your own server, beside the website and the email you already have, and it works in the browser: on a desk, on a laptop, on the road.
Nothing to download for your team, and nothing new to learn about where things are kept. They are kept with you.
It runs your website.
Because it lives inside WordPress, The Spine also publishes. A work you mark as public gets its own page, with its image, its facts and its credit line; each artist has a page; your news and events are written and published from the same screens.
So the website is never a second copy to keep up to date. It is the same house, seen from outside.
The rooms of the house.
Works
Each work with its images, its dimensions and technique, its papers, its price and where it is right now.
People
Artists, collectors, galleries and institutions, each with their history with you, and what is still pending between you.
Proposals
What you offer, to whom and when. A proposal that has been sent stays exactly as it was sent; a change becomes a new version.
Journeys
Works leave and come back: a loan, a sale, an exhibition. Each journey carries its works, its transport, its insurance and its papers together.
Papers
Every document lands on its work, its person and its journey. A certificate is never lost in a folder again.
The letters that come in are read and set beside the work and the person they talk about. What they say is noted, and becomes a fact when a person confirms it.
Conscience looks first.
Each morning Conscience reads the whole house and brings you one thing, the one that matters now, with the door to it already open.
It notices the work that has moved and not yet landed, or the paper that is still missing. It suggests; you decide. When nothing needs you, it says so, and keeps quiet.
The AI is optional.
Everything above runs on rules: what matters, in what order, and what is missing. They need no model, no account and no cost, so The Spine works the same on the first day, with no AI at all.
If you want it, a language model can phrase the sentences better. You bring your own key, from any of the major providers, and you can switch it off or change it whenever you like. It never decides anything; it only rewrites a sentence that was already true.
We built it this way on purpose. An art house holds things that can’t be replaced, and the software that keeps them should outlast any AI.
Lists that say who moves next.
Every list in the house is sorted the same way, by who owes the next step: what is ready for you, what is waiting for you, and what is waiting for them.
The same words for works, proposals, journeys and people. Once you’ve read one list, you can read them all.
Artists have their own desk.
An artist you work with can come in through a door of their own. From their desk they add their works, their portrait and their CV, see where their works are travelling, and write to you.
They see what is theirs and nothing else. And they add a work in a few lines: a title, an image, the year, the dimensions.
It speaks with your words.
Your terms, your consent texts and your answers to common questions are written by you, in the house’s settings. Nothing arrives generic, and nothing is borrowed from another house.
Each house works in its own currency. Prices, floors and fees are kept in it.
What you need.
A WordPress site on a server of your own, with a secure connection. That is all. The rest we set up with you.
And whenever you want, the whole archive can be taken out, in a form anyone can read without us.