Amy Cappellazzo jolted New York’s art world recently when she left her powerful position as chairwoman of Christie’s postwar and contemporary department to become a private art adviser, quickly brokering sales like Christie’s $82 million sale of a Rothko painting this spring.
Tobias Meyer, the regal chief auctioneer of Sotheby’s auction house, also surprisingly stepped down from his podium less than two years ago to become an adviser.
Guy Bennett, once a top Christie’s expert, now counsels the Qatar Museums and its chairwoman, Sheikha al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani.
For decades, art advisers were a small club of professionals who personally helped build collections for clients, using their scholarship and connoisseurship. Their role was to consult and offer expertise, rarely to make deals. Bernard Berenson, the Harvard-trained art historian, was a famed counsel to the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner.
“I’m not anxious to have you own braces of Rembrandts, like any vulgar millionaire,” he wrote to her in 1900.
But the rapidly changing art market — characterized by soaring prices, high fees and a host of wealthy new buyers from Wall Street and abroad — has prompted scores of new players to jump into the pool, from young art-world arrivistes to former auction-house executives with an abundance of expertise and connections. “It’s the Wild West,” said Abigail Asher, who has been an adviser for 25 years. “It’s like being in a gold rush mining town. We have been the miners for years and a lot of people are just showing up now.”
Many of these advisers are changing the profession — aggressively pursuing trophy art, wielding greater power in negotiations and in some cases acting more like fast-moving dealers than high-minded consultants...
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