It is a sign of the times that the top ten positions in the 2023 ArtReview annual Power 100 list are all taken by artists. Compare this with a decade ago, when mega-gallerists Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner jostled for the lead position, and it clarifies just how much power in the art market has shifted from dealers to artists in recent years. One particularly disruptive outcome of this change in tack has been that an increasing number of artists are eschewing gallery representation in favour of more flexible approaches to the making, marketing and selling of their art.

Rachel Jones, a London-based artist whose oil stick paintings of abstract imagery have been in high demand since she earned her MFA in 2019, quietly left Thaddaeus Ropac gallery last month to investigate alternative working methods. After three years with Ropac, she no longer plans to be represented by any gallery.

In September, Jones debuted her first opera-based work, Hey, Maudie, which was commissioned by the London non-profit The Roberts Institute of Art and supported by Ropac. In a statement, Jones says her time with the gallery was “transformative” and expresses “pride” at what they have “accomplished together”. She adds: “I’m now exploring different directions in my practice and want to take the time out to reflect and explore this independently.” In the meantime, she is also working towards a show at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, due to open in March 2024.

Jones’s desire for total autonomy is all the more striking given she is still in the earlier stages of her career. For more established artists, going it alone is arguably a less daunting prospect. In February, Peter Doig, an artist with a significant and longstanding market, announced his exit from Michael Werner gallery after 23 years together. Parinaz Mogadassi, Doig’s wife and the owner of Tramps gallery in New York, said at the time that Doig had begun “working independently, is not represented by any gallery and has no plans at present to join another gallery”.

Describing the relationship between any artist and dealer as “a delicate balance” of the professional and personal, Mogadassi added: “Ultimately, from an artist’s perspective, the best way to be assured transparency in all dealings is to be the one directly leading the conversations surrounding one’s work and life. You have to also feel there is a sense of like-mindedness.” She confirmed to The Art Newspaper in mid-November that her husband is still content to operate without dealer representation.

Rise of the artist agent

When United Talent Agency (UTA), one of the so-called “big three” US-headquartered talent agencies, launched a fine arts division in 2015, increasing artists’ autonomy was at the forefront of its mission. The late lawyer Joshua Roth, who founded UTA Fine Arts, said at the time: “We believe there is room for a serious, professional representation structure in the art world, one that helps artists gain greater control of their careers and opens the doors to new and better opportunities.”

Dealers argue that their profession already provides this structure and more—including a nurturing environment, an understanding of art history and long-established links with museums and private collectors. But as the fine art world has bled ever-deeper into luxury retail, fashion, TV, film, music and even sports, partnering with talent agents is becoming increasingly common for studio artists.

UTA Fine Arts quickly signed such vaunted names as Judy Chicago, Isaac Julien and Billy Al Bengston. Rival entertainment agencies WME (part of Frieze’s parent company, Endeavor) and Creative Artists Agency (CAA) have built their own burgeoning lists of fine artists. Much of these agencies’ mandate involves the commercial licensing of artists’ works or their adaptation into film and television projects. But they also broker other, more creative types of deals with corporate clients and brand partners.

A growing number of boutique agencies has also sprung up as an alternative to the conglomerates. The French businesswoman Marine Tanguy founded MTArt in 2015. Graham Southern (formerly of Blain Southern gallery) co-founded Southern & Partners, described as “an independent artist management consultancy”, in September 2020.

Then there are the individual agents. Stefan Simchowitz, a Los Angeles-based collector, spent years advising and making markets for living artists, including Serge Attukwei Clottey (previously represented by Simon Lee gallery, which entered administration earlier this year), before opening his own gallery in 2021. Amir Shariat, a Vienna-based artist manager and collector, has overseen transactions for fast-rising artists Amoako Boafo, Kennedy Yanko and others. Joe Hage, the founder of Heni Group and a partner at a London law firm, has quietly managed a handful of major talents, including Damien Hirst and the now gallery-free Doig, for many years.

As well as handling the all-important duties of marketing and PR, agents can help artists negotiate with major corporations. One example is the financing of a public sculpture for a new building—a type of deal with which the British sculptor Nick Hornby has extensive experience.

Hornby has gone without gallery representation for much of his career—not to deliberately sidestep the system, he says, but rather to manage the complexities of producing large-scale works more efficiently. This process often demands collaborating with engineers, fabricators, foundries and a slew of other specialists the average art dealer seldom engages with. As Hornby puts it: “We have to explore atypical scenarios to realise projects. This can lead to direct channels with collectors and funders.” He says that his three public commissions in London to date all came to him directly.

Trade-offs and ringfences

Among the benefits of self-representation are “a sense of agency” and the “ability to grow and shrink studio operations”, Hornby says, noting that it is also encouraging “knowing my value is set by my own reputation and not that of a gallery”. His studio team carries out much of the work typically undertaken by a dealer, including administration, logistics and archiving. The caveat is that Hornby must personally oversee most of his studio’s high-level business interactions himself. “I can only be in one place at a time,” he says. “It can be exhausting, and at times I find it hard to ringfence time to work purely on ideas, thinking, dreaming.”

While Hornby is often approached by architects and interior designers, he says sales are split “fairly evenly” between art consultants, collectors and traditional gallery projects. Commissions have come from a diverse range of organisations including Tate, Glyndebourne, Matches Fashion, British Land and Kensington and Chelsea Council.

Meanwhile social media has amplified artists’ exposure to a mass audience and put them in direct contact with buyers and potential partners. Although both data and anecdotes suggest relatively few sales are closed this way, art economist Clare McAndrew points out that Instagram and other social media platforms “can often be used as the initial discovery channel for sourcing and discovering new works and artists, with the actual sale itself then made through a gallery or fair, at auction or sourced directly from the artist”.

For digital artists in particular, online channels can be a lifeline. Despite the bottom dropping out of the non-fungible token (NFT) market, Beeple, aka Mike Winkelmann, whose NFT-backed digital collage Everydays: the First 5000 Days famously made $69.3m (with fees) in a 2021 Christie’s sale, still appears to be thriving without gallery representation. While Winkelmann’s 2.3 million Instagram following has no doubt generated business opportunities, an artist agent has played a role too. Loïc Gouzer, the former Christie’s dealmaker, has been advising Winkelmann—at least periodically—since his work entered the fine art world.

Away from headline-grabbing sales, however, artists’ greater potential for autonomy also comes at a time of enormous precarity. As Hornby puts it: “This is an extremely unusual time to be an artist. It can feel exhilarating and full of freedom, but also exposing and full of pressure.”

Art Basel and UBS recently issued their latest annual Survey of Global Collecting, which analyses the habits and attitudes of more than 2,800 high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) across the world. These affluent clients, who each have more than $1m of disposable wealth (excluding real estate and private business assets), keep the art trade bubbling, as the high end of the market was “key to maintaining aggregate growth” in 2022, according to the report. For auction houses and dealers, “the $1m-plus segment tended to fare better than other lower-price tiers”, it states.

However, among the survey’s findings is the cautionary note that, in the first half of 2023, only 9% of these wealthy respondents considered buying works priced at more than $1m, down from 12% in 2021. This decrease points to an “increasingly thin high-end following the strong post-Covid-19 bounce-back in sales”.

The most recent Art Basel and UBS Art Market report, which offers a wider view of the industry, estimates that the art trade last year turned over about $67.8bn in sales, about 5% more (discounting inflation) than its estimated $64.6bn turnover in 2011, when the market had recovered from the 2008 financial crisis.

The key indicator of health in the international art market, as in national economies, is growth. Yet the art trade is a relatively small global business in which sales have, by and large, flatlined for the past 11 years. Given that the population of the world’s HNWIs has more than doubled since 2011, according to UBS data, why is this the case?

Clare McAndrew, the economist who prepares the Art Basel and UBS reports, says that last year was “a very clear example of the high end carrying the rest of the market—but then we got this quite subdued result overall”. McAndrew adds that, although no one seems to know how many of the world’s 59.4 million millionaires and 2,640 billionaires regularly buy art, the number is “relatively small, so a widening of interest and spending across all segments would certainly mean more substantial growth”.

In other words, aggregate sales struggle to grow because the international art market has become over-reliant on a niche group of ultra-wealthy buyers. Significant growth could, theoretically, be achieved if the customer base expanded and individuals of more modest means bought lower-priced items in “scalable” quantities, as is the case in the $355bn luxury industry.

But how can that happen when the research of distinguished economists such as Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman and Branco Milanović tells us that the middle classes in high-income nations are being squeezed by the forces of global income inequality, as more and more wealth is being concentrated in the hands of the 0.1% and 0.01%?

Bottom-up alternatives

Unlike the art spending of the wealthy, the buying patterns of “professional class” collectors attract relatively little systematic study. But anecdotal evidence of shrinkage abounds in the art and collectibles markets.

“I remember one time, about 15 years ago, at Tefaf Maastricht, we wrote 81 invoices. This year, we did the same turnover, a little more even, and wrote five [invoices],” says the London-based antique map dealer Daniel Crouch. His experience exemplifies the much-heard observation among today’s art and antiques dealers that buyers are fewer but buy at higher price levels.

Yet other, younger players are aiming to reinvigorate the market from the bottom up, to try to democratise the ownership of high-quality art by serious practitioners. The Amsterdam-based online marketplace Avant Arte, for instance, has collaborated with contemporary artists since 2017 to produce affordable editioned prints and sculptural multiples. Begun as a blog in 2014 by 20-somethings Christian Luiten and Curtis Penning, Avant Arte now has 2.6 million followers on Instagram and has worked with 241 artists to date, including big names such as Ai Weiwei, Elizabeth Peyton, Jenny Holzer and Tschabalala Self. The company has sold more than 22,000 of its editioned works, says an Avant Arte spokesperson.

“The imbalance for me was that art can have a profound impact on people, intellectually and emotionally. And yet when you look at it next to music or fashion or other areas of culture that have built a much more democratic base, the breadth of impact is nowhere,” says Mazdak Sanii, the chief executive of Avant Arte, who, like Luiten and Penning, transitioned into contemporary art from the popular music scene.

Avant Arte recently surveyed what it calls its “new generation” buyers and found that 90% of respondents, more than half of whom are under 40, “didn’t find the art world welcoming”, says Sanii. “These younger collectors are going to provide at least part of the answer,” he adds, noting that the average price of an Avant Arte print is about €2,000.

Although prints have been democratising good art for centuries, Phillips New York gave this subset of the market a boost 15 years ago when it cannily rebranded prints by popular artists such as Warhol, Hockney, Hirst and Banksy as cooler-sounding “editions”, echoing the must-have limited offerings of the luxury industry. From 2008 to 2023, Phillips’s annual turnover in its worldwide Editions auctions increased by 827%. Last year, the department achieved sales of $40m, up almost 30% on 2022.

Other auction houses and companies like Avant Arte have followed Phillips in rebranding prints as editions. It seems the bigger challenge, given the prevalent perception of the art world as socially and financially intimidating, is how to encourage a wider audience to buy unique pieces.

At the rock-bottom price point of £200 or lower, the Instagram-based Artist Support Pledge (ASP) has proved a game-changer since its launch by the Sussex-based painter Matthew Burrows at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. The platform has posted more than one million original works since then, resulting in estimated sales of about £100m, according to Burrows. But he adds that turnover has slowed since the ebbing of the pandemic.

“The good news is that the Artist Support Pledge is expanding,” says Burrows. ASP is now working with the tech company Vortic to create a virtual gallery in which artists can show works of any value in their own dedicated exhibition space, provided they also post works on the original ASP site. The initiative is due to go live early next year. “The new platform is designed to give artists more autonomy in how and when their work is presented for sale while maintaining the ethos of a reciprocal economy,” adds Burrows.

Attracting new generations

At the same time, brick-and-mortar galleries are also doing their best to encourage a new generation of young professionals to buy original contemporary art. South London-based Copperfield is one of the many galleries now offering generous pay-by-installment terms to buyers who cannot afford to splash thousands in one go.

“One person quit their gym and used that amount to pay off monthly a small work by Larry Achiampong, while they took to running in the park,” says Copperfield director Will Lunn. “That work was really meaningful to them, and we were really pleased to make it possible.”

But can these sorts of lower-price initiatives really revive the international art trade’s moribund middle market in the way that, say, perfume has bolstered the luxury and beauty industries? According to the business data company Statista, worldwide sales in the fragrances market are set to hit $58.3bn in 2023—not far off Art Basel and UBS’s annual sales estimates for the entire global art market since 2011. Sales of the legendary Chanel No.5 accounted for about one-third of Chanel’s $12.3bn revenue in 2021, the perfume’s 100th anniversary, according to the Financial Times. A 35ml bottle currently sells for around £71, considerably less than even a £200 unique work from the Artist Support Pledge.

“The brand name is one of the most powerful assets for the luxury house,” says Kelly Meng Parnwell, a lecturer in luxury brand management at Goldsmiths, University of London. “Consumers buy lower-valued products with a luxury logo, not for the product’s aesthetic value, but for the social value that luxury brands can provide to them.”

Herein lies the problem for the art market’s “affordable” end. In relative terms, works by an interesting if little-known artist priced in the low thousands, or even the hundreds, can seem good value. But in a cash-strapped consumer culture dominated by luxury brands, if you can buy a legend for £71, pretty well all art looks expensive.