What’s an Artist Worth?

A wave of dealers are leaving galleries to start their own agencies with new ideas about how to build their clients’ careers.

In 2021, the artist Hank Willis Thomas took a meeting with Max Teicher, a Gagosian gallery veteran who was starting a new agency for artists called 291. Unlike the literary or film industries, the art world has historically operated without agents, as galleries essentially fill the role of manager, agent, and distributor in one, usually for a 50 percent cut of sales. Teicher and his co-founder, Andrea Crane, who’d left Gagosian years earlier, had noticed gaps between what a gallery could do for its artists and the opportunities available to them beyond direct sales: things like brand partnerships, luxury deals, public commissions, and plenty of other idiosyncratic desires. “Artists find themselves in situations where they’re wanting galleries to do more than selling work,” Thomas says, “and galleries aren’t always set up for that because they have their bottom line.” 

Thomas rose to fame in the mid-aughts with images of Black men branded with Nike swooshes, comparing the ownership markings of chattel slavery to contemporary corporate sponsorship, which makes us “feel we must brand ourselves in order to feel valuable,” he has said. In the 20 years since that series came out, the theme has taken an ironic turn in the artist’s career. His text-based pieces resembling ads in the early 2010s gave way to a series of political billboards timed to the 2016 presidential election. By the early 2020s, he was working in the brand business himself, designing a capsule collection for Helmut Lang using phrases from his art. If participating in the kinds of partnerships he once critiqued appears contradictory, he isn’t bothered by it. He has described his Helmut Lang collaboration, for example, “as an extension of my artistic practice exploring advertising and the ubiquity of messaging.” He thought 291 could help him do more of this kind of thing. Within three years, the agency had landed Thomas a pop-up exhibit of quilts made from the jerseys of NBA players for the 2022 All-Star Game and built up his reputation outside the States, starting with three “public activations” in England, says Teicher — at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the Southbank Centre, and the Glastonbury Festival — all culminating in a major London show at Pace gallery in 2024. 

In the past four years, more than a dozen dealers have left galleries to work for boutique artist agencies in New York. Former Hauser & Wirth partner Cristopher Canizares recently launched Artist Legacy Bureau, an agency that will represent Rashid Johnson, among a handful of other artists. Carol Cohen, a former owner of Untitled gallery, formed art[cc]corp in 2022 to produce artists’ films and represent them in editorial and commercial projects. In 2024, Anne Verhallen left 291 to launch the Kunst Agency. And last year, former Pace partner Joe Baptista left the gallery and formed the Equivalence Art Agency to continue working with artist Yoshitomo Nara, who left Pace for David Zwirner. 

“The middle market is weak, and many galleries no longer have the financial flexibility to develop artists slowly over a decade or more,” says the art economist Magnus Resch. When Jack Shainman was a smaller gallery, Thomas recalls, he could just “call up Jack, or Marc Glimcher.” He can still do that, he says, but assumes they have a queue of “probably like 100 other calls.” (In early June, Glimcher announced that Pace would cut 30 percent of its artists to just the “core relationships,” telling the New York Times that the megagallery system had become “too big, too commercial, too impersonal, and too corporate.”) At the same time, top artists increasingly operate like “global brands,” Resch says. Fees from brand collabs vary widely, but many mid-range deals will earn an artist between $100,000 and $500,000. “A top artist may now simultaneously have a gallery, an agent, a PR strategist, a publishing adviser, and a brand-partnerships team.”

There’s also much less stigma around “selling out” in the art world today. “Different industries increasingly overlap and collaborate,” says the artist Christine Sun Kim, who works with 291. “My work has always been about claiming public space and finding platforms beyond echo chambers, so brand collaborations feel like a natural extension of that. They open the work up to an audience beyond the collector class.” 

When the artist Titus Kaphar had the budget-stretching idea to build out a theater in Gagosian’s Beverly Hills gallery to show his new film, Verhallen got the speaker company KEF to donate the sound system. And she helped reverse engineer a more traditional art career for the landscape designer Lily Kwong. “We utilized a lot of brand partnerships to create public art,” says Verhallen. “And from the public art that we’ve done with these brands, we were able to get into institutions, and from the institutional projects, we were able to place Lily with Night Gallery,” a leading gallery for emerging art in Los Angeles. Teicher says he helped one artist who has “huge auction records” but never graduated from college land an honorary degree. It confers prestige, he explains, and “allows you to communicate about the artist differently.” 

Steven Pranica founded Creative Exchange Agency 32 years ago to manage photographers like David LaChapelle. He has since parlayed his proximity to luxury fashion brands into deals for a broader range of “cultural voices,” as he calls his clients, which include curators, designers, and the artist Kehinde Wiley, who, in 2021, put his signature botanicals on an American Express card and on the MTV “moon person” for the Video Music Awards. “The top luxury brands are all looking to grow culturally,” says Pranica, pointing to Cartier, Louis Vuitton, and other fashion houses that now run art foundations. In May, Dior held its Cruise 2027 runway show at LACMA, featuring shirts designed by artist Ed Ruscha. “Their consumers are looking for real connection into some of these other worlds.” 

Nearly all the agents say they do not sell much, if any, art and are therefore not in competition with galleries. 291 makes most of its money by taking a percentage of an artist’s overall income — typically 10 percent, though it can vary by client. Another major difference between some agencies and galleries? “They don’t care about having a good roster because they don’t share it,” says one agent. “They’re very secretive.” While galleries name their artists because “that’s retail,” Teicher says, he doesn’t want the narrative around his clients to be shaped by business dealings: “It does nothing for the artist.” (Another agent suggested 291’s discretion may conceal that it’s selling more art than it lets on: “Their business is much closer to what galleries do, regardless of what they may have conveyed to you.”) 

I visited 291’s Tribeca offices on a recent afternoon on the condition that I not report any inferences about its roster from the art on the walls. The agency reportedly represents 35 to 40 artists, living and dead. The space is surprisingly big with a full-time staff of 17, about a third of whom have worked at some point for Gagosian. There are indeed some lovely paintings on the wall by well-known artists. As we sit down for coffee in the lobby, Teicher tells me about how he sees the rise of artist agents as a seismic generational shift akin to the gallery visionaries Marian Goodman and Paula Cooper striking out in the ’60s and ’70s. “We see this as the next real pillar of the art world, which is behind — we’re still a very antiquated business.” 

Although the role of the artist agent is becoming increasingly professionalized, informal variations on the job have existed for decades. Joe Hage, a London lawyer, has quietly managed artists such as Damien Hirst, Peter Doig, and Gerhard Richter for years. After leaving Pace, Andrea Glimcher formed the art advisory Hyphen in 2014 to work as a “go-between” for the late painter Pat Steir and galleries. And former Droll/Kolbert Gallery director Barry Rosen has spent decades as an adviser to the estates of several Hauser & Wirth artists, including Eva Hesse and Lee Lozano, and separately to the glass artist Dale Chihuly. It seemed like a logical leap when the Hollywood agency UTA launched its fine-art division in 2015, but it never penetrated the traditional art world and suspended operations in 2024. Rosen thinks the entertainment agents simply couldn’t speak the language of the visual-art business. That’s why “they make terrible movies about the art world,” he says, mentioning The Christophers, the recent Steven Soderbergh film about a virtuosic painter aging into obscurity.

No number of brand deals, however, can replace the institutional heft of a gallery’s backing. “Galleries are still one of the strongest drivers of long-term artistic success because they provide validation and access to elite collector networks,” says the economist Resch. The artists that 291 works with are “generally already influential,” says Teicher. “They all have gallery representation.” Laurie Simmons, a central figure in the Pictures Generation of the 1970s, already had work in just about every major art museum when she became a 291 client in 2023. “He’s a visionary,” Simmons says of Teicher. “For so long, I was dreaming up a person who could make sense of all the things I’m doing and bring new opportunities.” The agency has helped her get a film collaboration with Christian Louboutin and her first-ever solo show at a photography gallery, Edwynn Houk, this fall. “I remember people calling themselves artist agents as far back as the ’80s or ’90s, and we all thought that was so stupid,” she says. “It’s not that way anymore. A lot of artists want to do fashion shoots, and they want to do skateboards.” 

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the June 15, 2026, issue of New York Magazine.

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