Private, but documented: tracing contemporary art galleries through provenance records

This paper examines the structure of the private contemporary art market by systematically extracting and analyzing provenance records from auction sales catalogues. We document strong home-country bias and a highly concentrated and heavy-tailed distribution of gallery activity. Moreover, provenance records offer valuable insights into a liquidity premium: (a) artworks previously traded in private galleries have significantly higher returns, and (b) artworks that previously failed at auction exhibit significantly lower returns, as confirmed through a repeated-sales regression framework. There is heterogeneity by the artist’s living status, with stronger effects observed for living artists compared to deceased ones. These findings highlight the informational role of provenance and the signaling power of transaction history in shaping market expectations and asset pricing in the art world.