About Philoteknia
You are being asked to put something you care about on a website. Here is who is on the other end of it.
Who runs it
Philoteknia is built and run by C-Ware BV, a small Belgian company at Hof ter Bollen 13, 2870 Puurs-Sint-Amands, registered under KBO/VAT number BE 0447.286.794. Not a foundation, not a museum, not a startup with investors to answer to.
Philoteknia is the work of Michael De Coninck, who runs C-Ware BV and built this site.
Writing to [email protected] reaches a person, not a queue.
Why it exists
Most art is not in museums. It hangs in hallways and spare rooms, and when a house is cleared it goes into a skip or an anonymous lot, because by then nobody is left who knows what it is. What is lost is rarely money. It is the knowing: who made it, who bought it, which wall it hung on for forty years.
Philoteknia is an attempt to keep that part. A record made while somebody still knows the answers, tied to the artwork by a number and a label, and meant to stay readable long after the person who wrote it has gone.
How it is paid for
By the people who use it, and by nobody else. There is no advertising on Philoteknia, no trackers, and nothing about you is sold to anybody. We count how many different people visit each month, and once the month is over we keep that number and nothing else about them. The privacy notice lists every company that touches your data and what each of them does.
Putting artworks on record is free, however many you look after, and following them is free and always will be. Beyond that, a few things can be paid for. Two are yours and cost five euro each, once: keeping a record private, and room for more photographs on one. A new custodian pays a transfer fee when an artwork passes to them, and, once selling opens, a custodian will pay a fixed fee to offer an artwork for sale. Dealers pay more: a fee by the quarter to trade here, and a fee by the quarter for each listing beyond those it includes. And a professional whom a custodian agrees to be put in touch with pays a fee for the introduction; asking costs nothing. That is the whole of the income.
It also means Philoteknia has no reason to want your attention. Nothing here is built to bring you back daily, because nothing here is sold by the visit.
What it does not do
Philoteknia does not authenticate artworks, does not attribute them to artists, and does not value them. A record is what its custodian says about an artwork, and every record says so on its face. It is evidence of a claim, kept over time, which is a smaller thing than a certificate and a more honest one.
Nothing is sold through Philoteknia yet. An artwork can be given to a new custodian through rehoming: whoever gives it is paid nothing, and the new custodian pays Philoteknia the transfer fee and nothing else.
If Philoteknia stops
A permanent record kept by a small company is only as permanent as the company, and pretending otherwise would be the one dishonest thing on this page. So, plainly: if we ever have to stop, every account holder is told at least three months beforehand, we try to find somebody to take the archive on, and if we cannot, every custodian is sent a copy of their own records and photographs before anything is switched off. It is set out in the terms, under "Ending it".
You do not have to wait for any of that. "A copy of your data" in My account gives you everything you wrote, at once, as a file; the photographs come as links that last about a quarter of an hour, so save them while it is fresh. Keeping your own copy of something you care about is a reasonable thing to do whoever is holding it.
In the meantime the database is copied every night, encrypted, and kept somewhere other than the server it came from, and another copy is taken before every change to the site.