The auction calendar thins out, the fairs are behind us and much of the art world’s public activity slows to a crawl. It’s a good moment to ask what state your collection is actually in, not what state you assume it’s in. Photography and cataloging are not glamorous work, and that’s exactly why they get pushed to the bottom of the list. Provenance research and the gaps you’ve been living withEvery long-held collection has a few works with provenance that’s incomplete. Summer offers something the rest of the art calendar rarely does: enough breathing room to address those fundamentals before the pace accelerates again.