The evening sale is not where provenance is tested. It is where provenance is ratified. By the time the hammer falls, a hundred small compromises have already been written into the lot note — a dealer's assurance here, a missing export certificate there, a widow's recollection standing in for a bill of sale. What Provenio does, before the catalogue is printed and before the underwriter signs, is read the record with the skepticism the record itself has quietly refused.
In the case of Basquiat's Untitled (Boxer), a painting that is, by any reasonable account, one of the artist's most frequently reproduced and least legally contested works, the canonical provenance contains a four-year aperture between 2003 and 2007. No export licence was flagged. No insurance claim was filed. The auction notes call this period, as they almost always do, "private collection." The language is anodyne, but the convention is editorial, not legal — and every title examiner knows the difference.
What changed, for us, was not the availability of the records — the customs filings, the shipping manifests, the insurance schedules all existed — but the cost of correlating them. For a human specialist, the work of reconciling a single lot against the Getty Provenance Index, Wikidata, Knoedler's stock books, and the raw customs output of three jurisdictions is a half-week of focused time. At evening-sale cadence, with two hundred lots a catalogue and four catalogues a year, the honest answer has always been: we don't. We sample.