Call my agent: why artist management companies are making a comeback – The Art Newspaper

Earlier than artwork sellers, there have been artist brokers—diplomats, secretaries and retailers who labored in Renaissance Europe to supply and worth artworks on behalf of consumers. Sellers emerged later, within the late sixteenth century in Antwerp after which in Amsterdam, and finally outmoded brokers.

At this time, as the normal gallery mannequin grapples with main upheavals and artists more and more take a extra interdisciplinary strategy, artist brokers are making a comeback. On the finish of final month, Cristopher Canizares left his place as a accomplice at Hauser & Wirth to launch an artist administration company, the Artist Legacy Bureau. He follows a gaggle of recent companies which have opened up to now two years, amongst them Sensity Studio, which was launched in London by the cultural strategist Dina Mostovaya with a view to selling feminine artists; Artwork+Mgmt, which was established in Miami by Julia Bassiri; and former mannequin Anne Verhallen’s KUNST Company, which works with creatives within the trend, artwork and music worlds. This spring additionally noticed the arrival of Spencer Younger, an agency-cum-advisory based mostly in New York.

Jon Horrocks, a former director at Stephen Friedman Gallery, which closed earlier this yr, is launching an artist company targeted on museum partnerships. “It’s such a zeitgeist second,” he says of the sudden spurt in companies, which he additionally identifies as a symptom of getting to remain “adaptable” in a “turbulent market”.

Not like galleries, many brokers function and not using a bodily house and so overheads are saved to a minimal. Horrocks describes his enterprise as “a small scale, bespoke affair”, which is able to develop to incorporate a roster of 4 or 5 artists on retainer. He’s presently working with Sarah Ball, who was beforehand with Stephen Friedman, and Nick Goss, who’s represented by galleries together with Josh Lilley in London and Ingleby in Edinburgh. “It’s very a lot a group effort with the galleries,” Horrocks stresses. “I’m focusing purely on bolstering artists’ institutional presence by participating with curators and securing museum exhibitions and acquisitions.”

Sliding-scale charges

His charge construction doesn’t observe “a conventional format”, with artists paying for providers on a sliding scale. “Some I cost a month-to-month retainer and others it’s fee based mostly, relying on the museum gross sales I make,” Horrocks says. “Some artists don’t have any illustration, and a few do. Some simply want a sounding board, whereas others want a full package deal.”

By taking over the “slower, bespoke work of long-term profession growth”, which includes property planning, participating with teachers and publishing archives, Horrocks hopes to “relieve a few of the stress on galleries”. He additionally goals to offer better company to artists, “who can then look extra holistically at their profession, not simply by means of the eyes of their galleries”.

As Horrocks factors out, companies will not be there to interchange the essential work of galleries. And, in accordance with the most recent Artwork Basel and UBS Survey of World Accumulating, sellers nonetheless dominate as the popular channel for gross sales, accounting for 43% of collectors’ spending in 2025. Nonetheless, one of many greatest tendencies in recent times is the sharp rise of so-called “disintermediated gross sales”, the place artists promote on to collectors from the studio, by way of Instagram or by means of direct commissions. Such gross sales doubled from 10% in 2021 to twenty% in 2025.

Rachel Keller and Sarah Davis have blended their gallery expertise with studio administration experience, opening Davis Keller gallery in Los Angeles earlier this yr. Davis, who beforehand ran her personal studio administration agency, says the concept was spawned by the wants of mid-tier artists who both work with large galleries that can’t provide the administration and studio assist they want, or smaller galleries with not sufficient employees or time to accommodate them. “Easing the stress” between galleries working exhausting to pay the lease and artists who need to continue to grow their practices whereas making gross sales is the purpose, Keller says. Their target market, in the meantime, is youthful collectors “who may not have entry to a special type of gallery”, Davis says.

The co-founders each assume that artists are extra empowered than they’ve ever been. Keller additionally factors out that sure artists are selecting to work in a extra interdisciplinary capability, with a brand new style of arts practitioner rising. “Artists may not simply be involved in having a solo or group present at a gallery however doing activations or collaborations with hospitality corporations or manufacturers,” she says. “Possibly that’s the place a 3rd individual emerges, which is the agent, supervisor or artistic director. It appears like all of us within the artwork world are beginning to want various things from our employers and collaborators. Artists are actually searching for the ‘in-betweens’ within the system.”

Precedents within the US

There’s a precedent for this new wave of companies—some extra profitable than others. In 2016, the Los Angeles-based leisure agency United Expertise Company (UTA) launched a tremendous artwork division in addition to galleries in Los Angeles and, later, Atlanta. Each areas closed in 2024 and UTA’s tremendous artwork operations stay paused.

An early adopter of the company mannequin with an ideal deal extra success was Artwork Company, Companions, which was co-founded in 2014 by Allan Schwartzman, Amy Cappellazzo and Adam Chinn, initially as an advisory service for personal collectors, museums and civic initiatives. In 2016, the agency was acquired by Sotheby’s in a deal valued at $85m; at that time, Schwartzman says the group started to experiment with offering providers to artists and estates. “Artists had attorneys to show to for property planning however had nowhere to show to map out a strategic curatorial plan for a way their artwork could possibly be positioned and cared for within the brief and long run,” he says. “The pondering was sound however forward of its time.”

In 2020, Schwartzman left to arrange his personal company, Schwartzman&, the place artist advisory clientele now represents round one-third of the enterprise. The uptick on this space got here partially as a result of shifts which have taken place within the artwork market because the starting of Covid-19. As Schwartzman notes, “Out of necessity, galleries grew to become more and more transactional,” whereas concurrently, “the primary wave of child boomer artists, upon whom this artwork market has ballooned, had been going through finish of life.”

Vital modifications in amassing habits are additionally acutely difficult the normal fashions which have underpinned the artwork market. “For many years, the artwork market saved rising and together with that, a inhabitants of artists to feed it,” Schwartzman says. “However right now’s artwork market is sort of a sport of musical chairs the place the music stops and as an alternative of 1 chair being eliminated dozens disappear without delay. The system is shocked, careworn and greedy at methods to get better.”

With some galleries “proving remarkably responsive and resilient and lots of others much less so”, as Schwartzman places it, it appears that evidently artist companies could possibly be the complementary mannequin the artwork market wants proper now.