Your Career As an Art Dealer: Galleries, Auction Houses

ART DEALERS ARE ESSENTIALLY SALES PERSONS. They sell art and occasionally buy some themselves, although usually for the purpose of reselling it. In a sense, the art dealer is no different from people selling cars or real estate. The more they know about the product they are selling, the better the job they can do. As an art dealer, especially, you need to know everything about what you are selling. Everyone selling art is going to be passionate about it, urgent to champion some new visionary or to defend an Old Master who has gone out of fashion but whose work still radiates wonder. If you are already excited about art, you are starting from the right place. A career as an art dealer is something you should seriously consider, even if what you are mostly concerned with is the work you do as an artist yourself. In fact, many of the people working in the art market are themselves painters, sculptors, photographers, or other artists. There is a long tradition, dating back to the origins of art dealer as a profession, of artists who were also dealers. It was often the case that the artist with the best business sense would emerge as representative for his/her own works also those of friends and colleagues. You could do the same today, although new galleries that open today are usually owned and operated by people who are more intent upon being dealers than artists themselves. These new dealers are usually taking the step to open their own business after having spent a few years gathering experience in other galleries or auction houses, while at the same time diligently scouting for artists whose work they admire and who are not represented exclusively by another gallery. What is critical, if this is a career that is appealing to you, is that you learn as much as you can about art, past as well as present. You will be entering a world of bright, well-informed people, with little room for anyone trying to fake it. In the highly competitive art world, you need to be the real deal if you want to get to the top. You might even, during your high school years, come upon that special period or style that you want to make the focus of your life's work. It may be the first time you see a great work of classic art, like The David of Michelangelo; or something more modern, like a drip painting by Jackson Pollack; or something completely different from anything you have seen before, like a pop art construction by Red Grooms. You will want to keep expanding the scope of your knowledge so that your favorite works can be understood and explained in the context of the entire panoramic global history of art. The art world can be very fickle and fashion conscious, lifting you up one year, when your gallery lands new artists who suddenly become the defining visionaries of the moment, then dashing you into despair the next year, as the market moves on and your artists have become yesterday's news that no one cares about any longer. You need to be extremely resilient to continue in this career, unless of course you achieve great success early on and are that rare dealer who goes from one success to another without ever a misstep. Besides intelligence, luck, passion, and resilience, it will help to be charming and graceful. Artists, especially the really good ones, can afford to be rough and uncouth, with no particular regard for social skills. Art dealers and the people who work in galleries and auction houses will frequently find themselves in social as well as business situations (often one in the same, as in an opening party for a new exhibit) with the wealthy and powerful. Proper manners allow you to be polite without being subservient or pushy. A touch of class never hurt anyone anywhere, and especially not in the art world.