Welcome to Arts Radar, a monthly column by Marc Spiegler breaking down key developments in contemporary art and the wider worlds of design, music, cinema and television.
The contemporary art market was once unique within cultural industries because, unlike writers, musicians, actors, stylists and others, even the most prominent artists didn’t have full-time agents negotiating with their distributors, in this case art galleries. Over the last few years, however, agents have become ever-more present within the industry. Many established artists are now looking into the model, driven both by the current market contraction and by the general trend towards working in a way that is more transversal, pushing their practice beyond the strict confines of what can be bought and sold in legacy galleries. Examples include Steve McQueen and Julian Schnabel’s feature-filmmaking; Wolfgang Tillmans and Issy Wood’s forays into music; not to mention the countless contemporary artists doing tie-ups with fashion brands (see last month’s Arts Radar on the return of Takashi Murakami’s Louis Vuitton mega-collab). As London gallerist Sadie Coles points out: “New models for working with artists are driven by their evolving needs, and by the additional support that they require given the multiple new channels where their work is now getting disseminated.”
Most art galleries are not really set up to handle such activities and, especially in such a tough market, have little incentive to expend scarce resources on these parallel projects. It also involves a very different kind of deal-making, involving actual contracts, still a remarkably rare thing in an industry that looks askance at formal arrangements. Yes, in the past some artists used their lawyers or studio managers to handle business matters. But it’s gallerists who were primarily charged with promoting and driving forward the careers of their artists. Sometimes this worked brilliantly and sometimes not so much — in part because the business is so highly consolidated, and thus the best-selling artists tend to get most of the attention. Analysis from the UBS and Art Basel art market report (which, full disclosure, I helped launch while running Art Basel) has consistently indicated that a) the top three artists of the gallery on average account for more than half of its revenue and b) those artists are predominantly painters.
Typically for a disruptive new element in an established industry, the role that agents play ranges broadly. Some, like the agency 291 in New York, follow the classical Hollywood 360-model, pushing forward their artist’s career at all levels and taking cuts of the full business. The agency’s artist roster is not public — in line with how film agents work — but my experience on past projects confirms the roster is significant. “The art world got bigger — artists have more opportunities and faster trajectories all over the world than in the time of Leo Castelli, when agents were not needed,” says 291 founder Max Teicher, referencing the legendary New York dealer who represented everyone from Andy Warhol to Donald Judd. “You could say the market is graduating into a model that’s been present in every other talent-driven business. And we focus on making sure that everything artists do — from museum shows to working with brands — fits into their overall goal structure.”
Other agents, meanwhile, focus exclusively on what’s called the “immaterial” part of the business: collabs, performances, films… everything but the traditional artwork itself. Martine d’Anglejan-Chatillon of London’s MDAC productions, for example, works with premier artists such as France’s Philippe Parreno and star stage-designer-turned-immersive artist Es Devlin, as well as musicians Brian Eno (on his AI-driven film “Eno”) and Richie Hawtin (on his art projects as Plastikman).
But agents don’t just work with stars. Ex-291 agent Anne Verhallen’s The Kunst Agency, for example, works with the environmental artist Lily Kwong and the immersive artist Boris Acket, alongside well-established painter Titus Kaphar.
Arguably the highest-powered agent working today, though, is Joe Hage, a famously smart and tough London litigation attorney who entered the art world as a collector, then got more and more involved with its business side over the last decade or so. In 2015, he became the agent for Damien Hirst, one of the first to have an agent. For decades, the Irishman lawyer Frank Dunphy drove tough deals with galleries and others for Hirst. Now, like Dunphy before him, Hage oversees deal-making for Hirst (and also artist Brian Clarke), but he’s also driving projects such as Hirst’s recent Supreme collab, thriving editions business and NFT drops.
The agent’s reach, however, goes way beyond repping Hirst. In 2017, he ramped up Heni, a platform selling editioned works by star artists including Hirst, Gerhard Richter, Arthur Jafa, JR, and Peter Doig — the star Canadian painter who last year declared he would no longer have ongoing representation with any gallery. Deploying an Amazon-style flywheel model, Heni also publishes books, produces videos with scholars, reports and aggregates news and art-market data, and offers fabrication and career-consultancy services to artists. It’s not about competing with the mega-galleries: Hage isn’t doing fairs, opening satellites around the world or hosting huge collector dinners. But if you want to see what a 21st century art business looks like — building new markets and heavily deploying data analytics to do it — keep an eye on Heni.
License to Shill
In the world of cinematic franchises, James Bond is unrivalled when it comes to tight brand control. So the film industry was shocked when Amazon announced it had reached a deal with 007’s gatekeepers that will allow the e-commerce behemoth to have its way with the secret agent. Here’s the backstory: When Amazon bought MGM studios four years ago for $8.5 billion, the Bond brand was clearly a big part of the valuation. But since the heirs of Bond-inventor Albert Broccoli — Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson — still controlled the IP, Amazon could not unleash its well-honed flywheel tactics. The heirs had reportedly blocked efforts to expand the brand’s universe with spin-offs focused on Bond villains and sidekicks, and refused to entertain the notion of streaming films on Amazon Prime concurrent to theatrical release. As a result, the whole enterprise ground to a halt — it’s been 4 years since the last Bond film, and Daniel Craig’s replacement hasn’t even been anointed. (In classic tech-mogul mode, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos immediately after the deal X-posted: “Who’d you pick as the next Bond?”) Regardless of who’s chosen, the new deal will push Bond into tricky new terrain. Optimists see the chance to finally pull Bond into the 21st century — Idris Elba was before judged too old to be the next Bond but he’s 8 years younger than the new and improved hard-body Bezos. Pessimists, meanwhile, fear the Bond brand’s beloved Brit stiffness will get diluted into a watery MCU-style American martini of mercantile licensing deals.
Building Storms
Architect provocateur Patrik Schumacher, who has helmed Zaha Hadid Architects since the sudden death of its founder in 2016, brought the culture wars to his usually reserved field with a 13,000-word essay on “the auto-destruction of architecture” for the Serbian architecture journal Khōrein, arguing that identity politics had displaced the intellectual rigor required for architects to truly innovate. The pull quote: “Architecture, as an autonomous, theory-led discipline, has ceased to exist…. under the pressures of anti-capitalist politicisation and woke virtue signalling.” Not surprisingly, this caused a furore among designers and the story got picked up by mainstream media. Schumacher’s jeremiad is rapidly shaping up to be architecture’s version of Dean Kissick’s “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art,” a hotly debated piece that a) contained some ideas that many people shared, b) put forward in such a way that few of them could embrace, and c) that many in the industry felt was a public attack from within.
What Else I’m Tracking
Christie’s AI Art Sale Defies Controversy, Surpasses Expectations [Art News]
Kate Bush and Damon Albarn Among 1,000 artists on Silent AI Protest Album [The Guardian]
Plunging Sales See Shine Come Off Luxury Goods at Auction [The Art Newspaper]
Collector Justin Sun Sues David Geffen Over Disputed Giacometti Sculpture [Artnet]
Having led Art Basel from 2007 to 2022, Marc Spiegler now works on a portfolio of cultural-strategy projects. He is President of the Board of Directors of Superblue, works with the Luma Foundation, and serves on the boards of the ArtTech and Art Explora foundations. In addition to consulting for companies such as Prada Group, KEF Audio and Sanlorenzo, Spiegler has long been a Visiting Professor in cultural management at Università Bocconi in Milan and recently launched the Art Market Minds Academy.
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