My career has stalled, and I spend more time on studio admin than actually working in it. I keep hearing about artist agents. I also keep hearing about AI agents that can do a lot of the administration for you. Do I need an agent or an agent? —Double Agent
I don’t know how much time you spend in the studio versus doing studio administration, but it sounds like the balance is off. The average artist should spend about 30 to 50% of their time on studio administration, depending on how they participate in the industry. And by studio administration, I mean the nuts-and-bolts stuff: inventory management, grant and residency applications, website maintenance. There are exceptions, and most artists will have stretches where admin takes over and vice versa. That’s normal. But the majority of your time shouldn’t be spent on administration. So, let’s get to fixing that.
First order of business: Artist agents are not the panacea we imagine them to be, assuming we can even agree on what they do. The term covers everything from estate planning to brand deals to career strategy. Few of them will write your applications or keep your inventory up to date. Fewer still place artists with galleries. Those agents are a bit like the narwhal, whose tusks were sold as unicorn horns in medieval Europe; the real thing exists, but it rarely lives up to the legend. It may be a spouse who runs the studio, or in one case I know of, a former gallerist placing artists who didn’t speak English at blue-chip galleries. The gallerist took 20% of sales, half from the artist and half from the gallery. It’s an expensive arrangement and it depended on the artists already having a market.
You keep hearing about these roles, though, because the market has had a few rough years. Sales by contemporary art dealers were stagnant in 2025, according to the Art Basel UBS Art Market Report. “Galleries are having to make thoughtful decisions about how they allocate their resources, and many can't carry the staff they once did,” consultant Kristen Becker of KB Art Strategies told me in a recent conversation. Becker offers strategic advice to galleries, nonprofits, artists, and art sponsors. “That means they can't always offer artists the level of support they used to, so we're seeing a range of services, including artist agents, step in to fill that gap.”