Lesson 1

The 5 primary art seller types.

Table of Contents

1. From or Through

2. Primary seller types

3. The Artist

4. The Private Dealer

5. The Broker

6. The Gallery

7. The Agency

8. How to sell art as your type and model

9. Questions

10. Assignment

1. From or Through

To sell art there are only three components that make that happen: the seller, the business and the buyer. Today we’re going to start with sellers. We’re going to define the primary seller types in our market, clarify the confusion around seller titles and their business models, how to understand your role as your seller type and that of your peers, and how to sell art through your type and model.

There are two formats of sellers in the art market: those who own what they sell, and those who don't. Those who make direct sales and those who are intermediary agents. The client acquiring art will either source it from the creative genius themselves (the artist) or through the people that have expertise on the creative geniuses of the artworks. These two formats determine your business model, your legal exposure, your relationship with buyers, your pricing authority, and the kind of professional you are in the market. Literally, your entire career unravels around your seller type.

In this lesson, we’re dividing these two formats into categories called the direct sellers (which is the artist) and the dealers (which are the intermediaries as we know them as private dealers, brokers, galleries and agencies). Even though there are other titles that can confuse our notion of the market, if there are more types of sellers out there, basically these five define the models of how art gets to buyers and collectors.

2. Primary seller types

We're dividing into two formats categories called the direct sellers, which are independent artists who sell their art (we’re not discussing gallery representation), and the dealers, which are the intermediaries: private dealers, brokers, galleries and agencies. Those are the five primary seller types in this market.

Where it gets confusing, because the art world has never been great at using titles consistently, is that you'll hear "dealer" used to describe a private dealer specifically, then turn around and hear it used as an umbrella for anyone who sells art that isn't the artist. "Gallerist" and "gallery dealer" get used interchangeably even though one implies ownership of the space/business and the other is the one conducting the buyer and collector relationships. "Broker" gets collapsed into "dealer" constantly, even though the business model and the relationship structure are completely different. And "agent" or "art consultant" sometimes means an agency model, sometimes meaning a private dealer who prefers a softer title. So the confusion isn't really about how many types exist, it's that multiple job titles often need to fill out the role of art sales, and when partnerships are trying to form within the industry, such as an artist wanting gallery representation or a curator forming an exhibit, or even an art consultant cataloguing a collection for a private collector, it can all get very confusing. Let’s wipe all that away and focus on only two things happening in this market: someone is either selling their own work, or facilitating the sale of someone else's.

Let’s take a quick look at these "other" titles so we can identify the confusion they cause when we're referring to the five primary types of sellers that standardize sales in our industry.

1. First, the art consultant advises collectors on acquisitions which means that sometimes they operate like a private dealer, sometimes like a broker, depending on whether they're earning a commission on the sale or a flat advisory fee.

2. Then you have auction houses, which facilitate sales between a seller and a buyer through a bidding process, and they're also qualified as intermediaries, but the model is so specific to that format that it operates as its own world. Not only that, auction houses carry most of what we document as our industry benchmarks revenue often giving the rest of the world an unfair illusion that we can match their pricing points and sales.

3. Art fairs are another one. They're not a seller type, but they're a sales channel that dealers and galleries use, so they get mistaken for a category when they're really just a commerce location and an event.

These are variations but they don't change the fundamental structure of our seller types. So when we talk about the five primary seller types in this curriculum, we're talking about the five models that define how art moves through the market professionally with the specific purpose of selling art in a transaction.

• The artist sells directly from their own practice.

• The private dealer sells through relationships and access.

• The gallery sells through a program, a space and a roster.

• The broker sells through transactions and market intelligence.

• The agency sells through capability and project work.

Each one has a distinct business model, a distinct revenue structure, a distinct relationship with the artist and a distinct relationship with the buyer. Try to understand them clearly and identify which one you are and how the others operate around you, because this will allows YOU to make decisions that actually belong to your model instead of borrowing from someone else's and getting frustrated when sales don’t progress.

So now let’s dive in to each seller type and their model. We’ll address artists as the direct sellers, the private art dealer, the broker, the gallery, and the agency.

3. The Artist

The artist who understands they're a direct seller, and builds accordingly, has the most influence in the industry. To me it’s often shocking how much autonomy and power an artist can leverage if they just set up their business, create art and find a rhythm of reaching their buyers and collectors, but then delegate it just because they believe they're not inherently equipped with entrepreneurial skills to have a successful art business. No intermediary takes a percentage, no gallery's taste filters which collectors get to see them… That is such amazing power, and most artists don't want to own it. I share this a lot in my consultations with artists: most of my clients are galleries. They are not succeeding in sales. Artists don’t realize that the market is highly favoring independent artists selling their work because buyers and collectors are wanting direct contact with the artist. Not only do they want to touch basis with an artist’s creative genius but they know that buying from a gallery, an artist is having to share their profit, which also means that the buyer is likely paying twice as much. When a gallery sells your work at $5,000, you receive $2,500. When you sell that same work directly, you receive $5,000. Over a career, the financial gap between an artist who builds direct collector relationships and one who routes everything through intermediaries is significant! What artists fail to fully understand and appreciate is not even the currency of money, but of the relationships with collectors, which seem to be so easy to delegate to an intermediary. When you sell directly, you know who owns your work. You know their name, where they live, what drew them to that specific piece, what else is on their walls. Then because you know that, you can reach out when you have new work that's genuinely right for them. You can invite them to your studio. You can tell them about a piece before it goes anywhere else. That kind of access to your own collector base is something galleries rarely give back to artists. The collector relationship becomes the gallery's asset, not yours. Direct selling keeps that relationship where it belongs.Then there's the autonomy, which is harder to quantify but impossible to overstate. An artist who sells directly to buyers decides what to make and when to release it, how to price it, who to offer it to first and on what terms. There's no waiting for a gallery to schedule your show, no having your prices set by someone else's market positioning, no being told that a certain body of work isn't right for this moment in the program. That creative and commercial freedom is what allows a practice to be genuinely responsive to the work at any given time. It's also what makes the practice fulfilling. Now, the business model of a direct seller is straightforward but it has to be built intentionally. Your revenue comes from selling originals directly to collectors, from commissions taken on directly without a dealer in between, from reproductions and licensing if that's part of your practice, and from any service-based work like events or education. Each of those streams requires its own structure with pricing, agreements, communication, delivery. The core of the model is a collector base that you own and develop yourself, which means building a list of people who have bought from you or expressed serious interest, staying in contact with them in a way that's personal (please, not just transactional) and offering them access to new work before it goes anywhere else. That's it, the model. It's really not complicated but it requires professional maturity in treating the collector relationship as the asset it actually is.

The artist who does this well doesn't need a gallery to validate their market and they definitely don't need an intermediary to access collectors. If at some point you do want to work with an intermediary, there will be a fundamental difference between choosing to work with an intermediary from a position of strength than depending on one because you have no direct relationships or skills of your own.

4. The Private Dealer

Let's dive into the dealers that don't have any overhead costs. Both private dealers and brokers work through relationships, so their model doesn't require a physical space. It's more about going to events, scheduling dinners or hangouts, tagging along together to studio visits, galleries, antique stores, etc. Artists are mostly known for being introverted, which makes sense why they want to delegate the connections to intermediaries in the market, but if you're skilled at relationships, being a private dealer is one of the most rewarding models to sell art.

They might represent a selective group of artists, or acquire pieces from a specific genre or period and resell at a profit. But different from brokers, they commit to their representation long-term, to become the got-, rare expert on a genre, style and career development. Private dealers operate in both the primary and secondary markets, and the way they work in each is different. In the primary market, a private dealer acts as a bridge between living artists and collectors. They form close partnerships with artists, sometimes working with them for decades, developing a deep understanding of the work and who it belongs with. In the secondary market, the private dealer is sourcing works that already exist in collections and moving them privately, meaning not through auction or public listing. If a collector wants to sell discreetly, or another collector is looking for a specific work, the private dealer facilitates the transaction.

On the inventory side, private dealers rarely own stock the way a gallery does. Most work sells on a consignment model, staying with the artist or current owner until it sells, and the dealer earns a commission on the transaction. Some work on a finder's fee basis, particularly in the secondary market. The arrangements vary, but the structure is consistently lean with no capital tied up in artworks that haven't moved.

A significant reason high-net-worth collectors prefer working with private dealers over galleries is privacy, which something I'll address further in the broker section. They don't want their acquisitions made public, which may be partly where the art market gets its reputation for gatekeeping. Collectors don't want their names attached to transactions where there a public display on their financial investments. Private sales are mostly arranged quietly between two parties through a trusted intermediary to protect both the details of the transaction and the individuals involved. The reputation of this model is more concentrated than anywhere else in the art market. A gallery can survive a difficult season, a bad review, even a problematic artist relationship, because the institution carries its own momentum but the private dealer doesn't have much of a buffer when a reputation issue comes up. One transaction handled badly (something such as a price misrepresented, a confidence broken, a collector's trust violated) can close doors that took years to open. The network truly is everything, and the network is fragile. That's not a reason to avoid the model, but it does mean understanding that it's a very high-risk career.

Finally, the regulatory context is worth understanding clearly, because the art market in general is one of the least regulated industries in the world. There are no licensing requirements to become a private dealer, no mandatory disclosures, no standardized professional criteria. Which provides great freedom and it allows the model to operate with the flexibility and speed that makes it work for the private dealer. But it also means the private dealer is entirely self-governing. The standards you set, the agreements you use, the way you handle confidentiality and conflicts of interest are all yours to define. Nobody else is going to enforce it. Which is exactly why the private dealers who build lasting practices are the ones who hold themselves to a higher standard than the market requires.

5. The Broker

Love or hate this, but the broker is the most transactional intermediary in this market. They don't represent artists long-term, they don't carry a roster, they don't produce exhibitions. This is mostly how I work. My format of selling art to buyers and collectors is a hybrid model of private dealer and broker, because I don't collect any commissions or cuts from the artist or vendor the way a gallery does. I get paid by the client for the logistics of sourcing artwork for them.

Brokers connect a buyer to a work, or a seller to a buyer, for a specific transaction. Then they move on to the next one. They are mostly associated for selling in the secondary market, which is where works change hands after the initial sale, but that has been changing significantly in the last decade. Brokers are now heavily involved in the primary market too, partnering with living artists, galleries and agencies to connect their buyers and collectors with work they want. Or vice versa. When a collector or an estate wants to move a work, they bring in a broker who will then researches the piece, verifies its authenticity and history, speaks in depth with the artist, negotiates, and facilitates the sales transaction.

Nothing in this market matters more than relationships and information, and the broker’s career is about pairing both, without the overhead of a gallery or the long-term obligations of a private dealer. On the revenue side, if the broker's model is through the commission structure, it is different from the gallery model in the percentage rates. Most brokers take commissions that typically start at around 5% for works over a million and can scale up to 20% for works under $100,000. The other revenue format is like mine, where the clients acquiring art use brokers to do the sourcing and managing the logistics around that process until the artwork is safely delivered to the buyer or the collector.

A negative connotation that follows brokers in this industry is that they are the strongest gatekeepers, just as I mentioned in the private dealer section. Because brokers navigate their entire career on relationships, they are adamant about preserving the confidentiality and privacy of their clients. I can speak to that firsthand with the number of people who try to access my connections without realizing that I'm not keeping opportunities out of reach, but deliberately protecting the privacy of my buyers and collectors. Not only as clients but as friends. Anyone can find buyers and collectors and form relationships with them because they are people navigating life like any other. They’re at events, gyms, grocery stores, etc. But it becomes a genuinely blurry ethical line when there's a deliberate strategy to access people using information that violates their names, whereabouts and financial condition, so as a broker I keep my connections separate unless it’s for the purpose of art acquisition initiated on their interest. That is why I have NDAs with everyone I work with, so they know their information is safe and confidential with me. The broker gets accused of being secretive but in a market where there's a massive subjective currency on trust, protecting your clients isn't secrecy, it's literally the ethical element of the job.

6. The Gallery

A gallery represents artists under formal agreements, produces exhibitions, maintains a physical space and sells work from inventory or on consignment. That physical presence is actually what defines the model and also what creates its cost structure.

First, the importance of it being a physical location anyone can visit is what attracts an increased number of potential sales where private art dealers and brokers are relationships that have to cross paths at some point, literally existing in a location for people to come in broadens opportunities. The thing is, a physical location for a business has a lot more cost to it. Rent, staff, production, shipping, insurance, art fairs… In our time these are fixed costs whether sales are happening or not. Since the pandemic, gallery overhead has effectively doubled in many markets. A single art fair booth at a major fair like Art Basel or Frieze can start at $50,000 and easily reach $200,000 once you factor in hotels, dinners, transportation and insurance. And galleries participate in an average of five fairs per year because roughly half of all gallery sales now happen at fairs.

The commission structure is where the gallery's revenue model comes from. The standard split is 50% to the gallery, 50% to the artist. The variations of that are some galleries taking 40% with more established artists or taking 60% with emerging ones. The important thing to understand is that the gallery's 50% is not profit, just like for artists. It's the revenue from which that entire operational infrastructure is funded. The average gallery profit from that 50% split is only 10–15%, which is a thin margin for a business carrying that kind of overhead. A gallery can do a show with ten paintings at $10,000 each, sell two of them, and lose $15,000 on the exhibition after costs. Sadly that is not an unusual outcome.

As galleries are the majority of my consulting client base (and with information I gather from peers and data resources) galleries are not the most successful resource for an artist's career or for business profitability at the moment. Many gallerists love the art world immensely but struggle to secure solid buyer and collector relationships just as much as an independent artist who hasn't found a footing in their art sales. Both are in the same boat. But galleries have higher bills to cover.

The gallery's commercial logic rests on two things working in parallel: the strength of its program (which are the artists it represents, how it positions them and whether the program has a coherent identity that collectors recognize and trust) and then the depth of its collector relationships, which in the end, just means how much they trust the gallery enough to buy on the basis of a recommendation or personal experience. A gallery with a strong program and weak collector relationships fails. A gallery with deep collector relationships and a weak program fails as well. It takes real intelligence and skill to harmonize those two key elements for success.

Artist representation in the gallery model is typically formalized through a contract. A lack of a contract or at least an agreement is unquestionably an immature decision on both ends. Those agreements usually cover commission structure, geographic exclusivity meaning the artist agrees to sell only through that gallery in a specific radius for the duration of the relationship, and how pricing will be managed. Exclusivity benefits the gallery because it gives them control over the supply and demand of the artist's work in their market, which in turn gives them a reason to invest heavily in promoting that artist. But it requires something significant from the artist in return: a genuine commitment, a consistent practice and the willingness to cede some commercial autonomy in exchange for institutional support.

When that relationship works well, the gallery introduces the artist to the collector, manages the sale, handles the communication and builds the ongoing relationship. That's the value the gallery provides. But it also means that if the relationship between artist and gallery ends (and many do for various reasons) the artist often leaves without their collector base and has to start over. This is one of the tensions at the heart of the gallery model that rarely gets discussed openly because the reasons a partnership ends can affect one or both parties' reputations. For many artists, gallery representation provides access to collectors, institutions and markets they simply couldn't reach alone but it's a reason to understand exactly what you're entering into and to ensure that any agreement reflects the reality of what both parties are committing to.

The gallery world is also increasingly stratified. At the top are the mega-galleries like Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, which operate globally across multiple locations representing artists whose works command six-figure prices or higher, function more like multinational corporations than traditional gallery spaces. There are mid-size galleries, which are mostly the backbone of the market but are currently under the most financial pressure because mid-sized dealers have seen sales stagnate or decline amid rising operating costs, caught between the financial muscle of mega-galleries and the leaner models of smaller spaces. Then there are emerging galleries, which are often artist-run spaces where people split their time between their practice and managing the gallery as a business. There are also online-only models like the market places each with different cost structures, different collector bases and different roles in the ecosystem. We all know by now that the gallery world is not created equal so where a gallery sits in that hierarchy shapes its operations, who it can attract and what it can realistically offer its artists.

But of all the intermediary models in this market, the gallery is the only one that creates a dedicated physical and cultural space for art before it finds a home. A private dealer works behind closed doors and a broker facilitates a transaction. A gallery opens its doors to the public, hangs the work on a wall, invites people in and says “this matters, come see it”. That act of making art available to anyone who walks through the door is an exclusive element to this model. And just because of that it carries more overhead than any other model in this list and operates under more financial pressure than most people on the outside realize. That is a role worth understanding, worth respecting.

7. The Agency

The agency is the newest and fastest growing intermediary model in this market, and also the one that most directly mirrors how other creative industries have operated for decades. Music has always had talent agencies, film has always had management companies, and finally now the art world is catching up.

An art agency represents artists not to sell finished artworks as a product but as projects. To manage and develop their careers across multiple revenue streams simultaneously. Commissions, murals, brand collaborations, licensing deals, live painting events, museum partnerships, institutional projects, publishing, residencies. The agency's job is to identify the right opportunities, negotiate the right terms, protect the artist's interests and make sure the career is building in a coherent direction rather than just reacting to whatever comes in. That is a fundamentally different role from anything the gallery, broker or private dealer does. Those models are built around transactions for projects.

Let’s take a look at their model.

Agencies typically earn between 10% and 35% commission depending on the type of project and the scope of representation, which is substantially lower than the gallery's 50%. Some agencies work on a retainer basis, where the artist pays a monthly fee for ongoing management, then a smaller commission on specific projects. Some work purely on commission with no upfront costs. The exact structure varies widely because the agency model is still developing its norms. Unlike the gallery, which has operated on roughly the same commission structure for decades, agencies are still figuring out what's standard and what's appropriate, so we’ll see major shifts in this model in years to come. That flexibility is a feature for artists who want a tailored arrangement, but it also means you NEED to understand exactly what you're agreeing to before you sign anything.

What makes the agency model genuinely different from the others is the breadth of what it connects artists to because a gallery operates within the art world but an agency operates across industries. Talent agencies entering the art world have helped artists extend their reach into fashion, tech, urban development and publishing, bringing art into public spaces and new markets. A mural on a corporate headquarters, a collaboration with a fashion brand, a licensed print on a homeware range, a commission for a public institution. They're a completely different commercial conversation with a completely different client profile, which if you think about it, expands more art into the world rather than just circulating within the industry itself. And they require someone who knows professionally how to navigate those conversations on an artist's behalf, because most artists don't and shouldn't have to.

The agency model is also where art and intellectual property is addressed most directly. When an artist licenses their work, they're not selling the piece but the image of it. I once consulted an artist who had been scouted by a multi-million dollar company asking for artworks for their product packaging and the artist almost priced their request as creating an original painting for a fixed price instead of licensing the image. The difference of their original proposal cost would have been $4000 when we actually closed for $113k as a licensing deal. You grant permission for a specific use of the image, within defined terms, for a defined period, in exchange for a recurring fee or a royalty. They track the contracts, ensure the terms are honored, collect the royalties and protect the artist from arrangements that exploit their work without fair compensation. This is one of the areas where artists lose the most money, because licensing agreements are complex and the details matter enormously. Who owns the image in a collaboration? For how long? In which territories? For what purposes? An agency exists in part to make sure those questions have answers before the work begins.

The relationship between agencies and galleries is worth understanding too, because it's in the nuanced-dynamic phases in the market right now. Agencies are not replacements for galleries because dealers still dominate as the preferred channel for sales, accounting for 43% of collectors' spending. But what agencies offer is something galleries historically haven't provided, where they’ll take on the slower, more strategic work of long-term career development.

The good thing is that as galleries try to be exclusive representatives of artists with other galleries, an artist can have gallery representation and agency representation simultaneously. Many do! The gallery handles the primary market sales and the collector relationships. The agency handles everything else outside of the art industry.

The agency model is still young in the art world, which means it's also still unregulated and inconsistent. But that’s true to the majority of the industry. Anyone can call themselves an artist's agent. There are no licensing requirements, no professional standards, no governing body. That means the quality of agency representation varies enormously, and artists entering agency agreements need to be particularly careful about what they're signing, and agencies should be excessively transparent and communicative.

8. How to sell art as your type and model

Knowing what kind of seller you are is the first step. The second (and most important) is building the operational framework that makes selling repeatable. Because here's what separates professionals from practitioners in this market: professionals have knowledgeable expertise, especially as systems, as practitioners have sporadic “successful” moments. A moment is when a sale happens because the timing was right and the person was in front of you but a system is when sales happen frequently and you can strategically make growth happen over time.

There are four things every art seller needs to have working at the same time: inventory, relationships, pipeline and agreements.

Inventory is what you have to sell.

• For an artist, it's the work coming out of the studio.

• For a dealer or broker, it's the work you have access to at any given time.

• For an agency, it's the roster of artists and their available capacity for projects. Inventory has to be managed deliberately, which means knowing at all times what you have, what it's priced at, where it is physically located, what agreements are attached to it and what condition it's in.

Relationships are who you have to sell to. This isn't about having a lot of contacts but definitely about having the right contacts and maintaining them with quality social skills. A relationship in this context is not a friendship, though it can become one. It's a professional connection built on mutual trust and relevance. You know what they collect, what they respond to, what moments in their life create openings for acquisition. They trust that when you reach out, it's worth paying attention to. Building that takes time, but it also takes structure. The relationship file is the operational asset that turns one-time buyers into returning collectors, and it's the single most underbuilt system in the art market.

Pipeline is what's in motion right now. Every professional seller needs to know at all times how many active conversations they have, where each one is in the process and what the next step is for each. There are five stages in any sales pipeline regardless of seller type: awareness (they know you exist), interest (they've responded to something), qualification (you understand what they want and whether you can provide it), proposal (you've made a specific offer) and close (they've said yes and the agreement is signed).

Agreements are the legal and professional structure that protects every transaction. This looks different across the five seller types.

• An artist selling directly needs a sales and policy agreement and a commission agreement at minimum.

• A private dealer needs representation agreements with artists and sales and policy agreements with collectors.

• A broker needs transaction agreements that clearly define their fee, their scope and their confidentiality obligations.

• A gallery needs consignment agreements, representation agreements and sale agreements.

• An agency needs project contracts that define deliverables, timelines, usage rights and payment terms. What they all have in common is that the agreement has to exist before the transaction happens, not after. In this market, the most common and most expensive mistakes happen in the gap between a verbal agreement and a written one.

As you can tell, the application of this framework varies by model but the four elements are the same, and the principle is the same: build the system first, then sell through it.

Questions

1. Which seller model are you currently operating in?

2. Think of an artist you know or admire. Which intermediary model would serve their practice best and why that one specifically?

3. A collector walks into a gallery, buys a work, then six months later contacts the artist directly for a commission. How many seller models just touched that one collector relationship?

4. Why does the art market need all five models to function? What breaks if one of them disappears?

5. Which of the five models do you understand least and what would it mean for your practice if you understood it better?

Assignment

Write your seller profile in one paragraph:

• State your model;

• How you currently generate revenue;

• Who you have active agreements with;

• How your transactions happen today.

Answer these questions:

1. What is the one operational element in your model that is missing right now: inventory, relationships, pipeline or agreements?

2. What are you going to do to fix it?

The dealers who build the most lucrative and respected practices in this market understand their model and rule decisions over their career.

Hope this helps! Let's sell art.

Next week on Lesson 2: How are you selling art? The formats of selling art vary if it is presented as a product or service. You get to choose that format, but if you're not presenting it in the right way, that might be why you're not selling out. Let's look into that and get you structured for lots of art sales.