The Role of Art & Antique Dealers An Added Value
CHAPTER 7. DEALING: ROLES AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
While the earlier chapters have concentrated on art and antique dealers as businesses and generators of income and employment, there are many other roles that dealers fill in society. Through their unique position as intermediaries between producers and consumers of art, dealers have acted as important promoters of new styles of art and as disseminators of visual culture around the world. Contemporary art dealers throughout history have often developed strong bonds with the artists they work with, and play a significant part in their career development, marketing and promotion. Dealers have also helped to illuminate both taste and condition in the older art and antiques sectors. Their role has not only been selling and restoring works, but also as historians, tracing a work’s life story through its past ownership records and mapping out its cultural and historical significance.
7.1 Dealers and Ethics
Dealers have played a critical part in shaping the canon along with art historians, critics and academics, not only through discovering underrated quality in the market, but also in communicating the desirable characteristics of works to buyers and the public at large, often creating new vocabularies and visions in the process. Although the art historical literature has focused largely on the importance of the artists of a given period, art dealers that supported their careers were a creative force of great importance, and exerted significant influence in introducing a vibrant collecting culture, shaping trading practices, and shaping public taste as well as the actual style and content of what artists produced.
The role of tastemaker is not always a comfortable one for dealers: some claimed that they did not feel it was always appropriate for them to shape preferences as they only sold what they knew. However, many did feel a duty to help teach their clients the difference between “good and bad” examples of art and antiques, or to let clients know when they had “become collectors” (and not decorators or random buyers), at which stage they might be able to encourage them to diversify and try new things. However, what is good, bad or collectible is a subjective issue, and by nature a matter of debate and often disagreement between dealers and other actors in the art market. As one dealer noted, “every dealer espouses quality, but also defines it personally”.
Taste aside, even aspects of dealer expertise are open to deliberation. Authentication, for example, is not an exact science and there are very few (non-contemporary) works of art or antiques where there is completely irrefutable provenance. However, authenticity and provenance have substantial effect on market values.
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