The Art Angle Podcast: From Handbags to Hard Cash, How Dealers Woo the Artists They Want to Rep

From Chanel handbags to cash in hand, there are lots of ways to woo an artist.

Jean Honoré Fragonard's The Progress of Love: The Meeting (ca 1773).

Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that delves into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join us every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market, and much more with input from our own writers and editors as well as artists, curators, and other top experts in the field.

The art market is a notoriously wooly place, where deals are done with hushed handshakes behind closed doors. This of course applies to auctions and art sales, but it’s also true when it comes to something even more fundamental to the art business: artist representation.

How does a gallery nab a hot new artist? And how does an artist ultimately decide to join them, to stay on during moments of skyrocketing success, or leave at any given time? There are no rules to this game, but there are definitely some trends—and some are almost too strange to believe. On this week’s episode, European market editor Naomi Rea—who recently wrote about the tangled relationship between dealers and their artists—joins European editor Kate Brown to discuss the wild world of galleries wooing artists and winning representation.

 

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