Move over galleries: artists sign with agents

The British artist Stuart Semple has signed a contract for worldwide representation with the fashion agency Next Management, a move that highlights again how the traditional artist-gallery relationship is changing. Several artists, including Damien Hirst and Keith Tyson, have agents or managers who provide financial advice and handle their business dealings with galleries, but Semple says his collaboration with Next Management will more closely resemble relationships in the music industry, where managers act as a buffer between their acts and the outside world, helping to promote their work and negotiate their projects.

Next Management, which represents hundreds of models as well as actresses such as Jessica Alba and musicians including Lana Del Rey and Jessie J, says it will help Semple to negotiate deals in the luxury goods industry, an area of increasing importance to artists.

Semple says that the task of selling his art and cultivating relationships with collectors will still be done by the galleries that exhibit his work—Anna Kustera in New York and the Fine Art Society Contemporary in London. However, Semple adds, there is room for another intermediary. “You won’t find a decent musician without a manager in this day and age. Yes, they have a record label that makes their work available, maybe advances them money to make it, but their manager stands between the artist and the label. Same with… artist, gallery and manager. There’s no real difference.”

The key question is whether or not managers can develop artists’ careers in the same way as dealers, who build reputations through years of curated shows and by successfully placing their artists’ work in museums and prestigious private collections.