For artists

The founding offer

For the first cohort only — twelve to fifteen artists, closed permanently once the museum launches.

Commission

0% on your first five sales. Then the standard ladder: 30% → 20% → 15% as your cumulative sales grow. It goes down as you sell more, and it never goes up.

Badge

Founding Artist — permanent, visible on every page your work appears on, and never issued again after launch.

Residency

A guaranteed week holding the Nave: the museum’s entrance hall, its plinths and a wall given over to you alone.

Pricing

You set your own prices, per size. We never change them.

Leaving

Leave whenever you like. Your work comes down within 48 hours, and your sales record stays yours — see what you keep.

Why five sales rather than ninety free days: artists are motivated by sales, not calendars. A time-boxed offer rewards whoever happens to be busy that quarter; five sales rewards everyone equally, and the offer cannot quietly expire on someone who joined during a slow month.

How it works, end to end

Plainly, with the unglamorous parts included.

1. Apply. Your name, where you work, a link to anything you’ve made, and three images. One paragraph on what you make. That is the whole form.
2. We reply within 72 hours. If it’s a no, you get an actual reason, not a template.
3. Set up your hall. Pick your architecture — Nocturne (black marble, cold shafts), Vault (brick, warm brass), Atrium (limestone, high side-light), Cellar (plaster, one raking beam) — and write your statement.
4. Upload a work. Photograph, title, medium, year, exact dimensions, and a price for each size you’ll sell. We check your photo before a human reviews it and tell you immediately if it needs reshooting — skew, glare, crop, resolution.
5. We review within 24 hours. After five clean approvals you skip the queue entirely and your work goes live the moment you upload it.
6. It hangs. You choose where on your walls, and in what order visitors meet it.
7. It sells. You get the buyer’s address and you ship it yourself. You set your own shipping rates by region, and you keep control of how your work is packed.
8. You get paid. The sale appears in your ledger immediately, moves to Cleared when the payment settles, and to Paid only when you confirm the money arrived. There is no button anywhere in our admin that can claim you have been paid.

Money — all of it, up front

Nothing here is buried.

• Commission is tiered on cumulative sales: 30% → 20% → 15%. It goes down as you sell more, and it never goes up.
• The rate is fixed at the moment of sale. If your tier improves next month, past sales aren’t recalculated and future ones aren’t charged the old rate. The rate that applied when the buyer paid is the rate stored on that line, permanently.
• You set prices. You set shipping. We add nothing to either.
• Prices include tax — one convention across the whole platform, so buyers always see the real number.
• Buyers pay import duties on international orders, and we tell them so before checkout. This protects you from refused parcels.
• Every payout line carries a transaction reference, and the line is only closed when you tap “I received this.”

What we take a cut of: the sale price of the work. What we don’t: your shipping charge.

What you keep

• Your copyright. Entirely. We license nothing beyond displaying and selling the work while it is listed.
• Your prices, your hall, your hang.
• Your record. Every sale builds an Earnings Passport — a signed document and a public verification link showing works sold, date range, price bands and exhibition history. Most emerging artists have no verifiable evidence that they sell work, and that evidence is what residencies, grants and galleries ask for. It’s yours, and it stays valid if you leave.
• Your provenance. Every work we broker starts a permanent record in your name. Only the platform that handled a first sale can attest to it — which is why no one can retroactively give you this later.

What we won’t accept

• Work you didn’t make.
• Reproductions of work still in copyright.
• AI-generated images sold as original art. This one is absolute.
• Photographs so poor the work can’t be judged. We’ll tell you how to fix it.

We generate the rooms. We never generate the art.

Every architectural image on Orchadelisa — the vaults, the light, the empty frames, the plinths — is rendered. Every artwork is real, photographed, and made by a person whose name is on it. You will never find a synthetic painting on this platform, including in our own marketing. It is the reason the museum’s entire visual system depicts empty frames.

Your work is not training data

The same promise runs outward, and it is enforced in our crawl policy, not just stated here. The site is divided in two: Orchadelisa’s own editorial writing in the Archive is offered to AI training crawlers freely, and the artists’ original work is not — every artwork page, every artist page and every catalogue hub that lists titles, media, sizes and prices is disallowed for training corpora such as GPTBot, Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended. Citation crawlers — the ones that answer a question with a link — remain welcome everywhere, because being findable is the point.

The split is published machine-readably in the site’s robots.txt and llms.txt, and a standing check in our build refuses to publish a robots file that stops implementing it. If this page and that file ever disagree, the build fails rather than the promise.

The open call

The open call for the founding cohort has not opened yet. It will be small — twelve to fifteen artists, closed permanently once the museum launches — and the application will be the whole of step one above: your name, where you work, a link to anything you have made, three images, and one paragraph on what you make.

Until it opens, the museum can be judged the way it asks to be judged: walk the halls, read the terms above, and notice that every promise on this page is the checkable kind.