Art dealer
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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An art dealer is a person or company that buys and sells works of art.
An art dealer typically seeks out various artists to represent, and builds relationships with collectors and museums whose interests are likely to match the work of the represented artists. Some dealers are better than others at anticipating market trends. Some prominent dealers may be able to influence the taste of the market. Many dealers specialize in a particular style, period, or region.
Some people find their way into becoming art dealers by studying the history of art. Related careers that often cross-over include curators from museums and art auction firms. Related careers include being an art critic or an art academic.
Can you tell a Picasso from a Kandinsky? How about a daVinci from a Botticelli? If you love art, but you’re better at business than painting, you might consider becoming an art dealer.
Art dealers travel, often internationally, to exhibitions, auctions, and artists’ studios, looking for good buys, little-known treasures, and exciting new works. Most dealers specialize in the art of a particular period or region. One might deal in contemporary Canadian art, another in seventeenth century Dutch painting, another in abstract art of the 1950s and 1960s.
You can also specialize in areas such as folk art. One recent trend that has attracted a lot of dealers and collectors is “outsider art”—the works of people who have little or no formal training in art and who don’t identify themselves as artists (or didn’t until people started buying their creations).
When dealers buy works of art, they resell them either in their galleries or directly to collectors. Those who deal in contemporary art usually exhibit artists’ works in their galleries, and take a percentage of the price the works sell for.
Dealers have to understand the business side of the art world. They keep up with trends in the market and are knowledgeable about the style of art people want to buy. They figure out how much they should pay for a piece and estimate what they can resell it for. But they are also passionate and knowledgeable about art. They recognize the styles of different periods and individual artists. Most of the time, they can tell authentic works from forgeries (although even dealers are sometimes fooled). Those who deal with contemporary art promote new artists, creating a market for their works and enabling them to make a living.
To determine an artwork’s value, dealers inspect the objects or paintings closely, and compare the fine details with similar pieces. Some dealers with many years of experience learn to identify unsigned works by examining stylistic features such as brush strokes, color, form.
