Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.
On the first day of the November marquee auctions in New York, art dealer and adviser Arushi Kapoor announced a new strategic partnership with the global real estate brokerage The Agency.
The partnership, dubbed the Agency Art House, offers art advisory services for clients who recently bought a new luxury home, are looking to build an art portfolio, or add to an existing collection.The services offered include market research, provenance, authentication, valuation, collection management, as well as logistics, installation, insurance, and related financial services.
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The partnership is notable due to Kapoor, 28, being one of the youngest art advisers in the industry. She is also involved in organizations such as the UNICEF Next Gen Board, the Young Collectors Board at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, LACMA’s Future Arts Collective, and Tate Modern’s South Asian Acquisitions Committee.
The Agency also has more than 130 real estate offices in 12 countries. CEO and Founder Mauricio Umansky has also been featured in appeared in the reality television shows The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip, Dancing with the Stars, as well as starring in Netflix’s series Buying Beverly Hills.
The partnership was officially launched at a party in Los Angeles, followed by events at Art Basel Miami Beach and the Untitled Art Fair late last year.
ARTnews spoke with Kapoor by phone to learn more about the strategy behind the Agency Art House.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.
ARTnews: What has the reception been like so far to the announcement and where has interest come from?
Arushi Kapoor: The reception for the Agency Art House was beyond anything that Mauricio or I could expect … I think there is a need for a service which is transparent, which is backed by a large real estate organization that is well known and that has ethics and a track record. There’s a huge need for educatoin—we’ve spoken about this a lot—people don’t know how to evaluate artwork. There are a lot of people that want to collect artworks and want to get into artworks as an alternative asset, but they don’t know where to begin. I believe the reason for that is that traditionally, the art world was only accessible to the 1 percent and, since it was only accessible to the 1 percent, very few people were collecting. I’m talking about the ’80s, going into the ’90s, only the top echelon of the world was collecting artworks as an alternative asset. So, for a lot of people, they still think that if you want to buy artworks that are going to hold value, just like real estate, you need to be spending, at minimum, a couple of million. At the maximum, several hundred million. Because everything that we hear in media is about the top art in those price ranges, right?
We have a lot of clients through the agents at the agency—and outside of the agents as well—that are new art collectors. These are collectors that haven’t indulged in buying artworks as an asset before, because they don’t know where to go or how to start. The art world has traditionally been very opaque. We don’t allow new people to come in … But we are in a whole new world. There’s a lot of wealth in other sectors: in finance, in tech, in the startup sector. And all of these people want to diversify their assets, but they don’t know how to. A good amount of our clients that are coming in are these clients that want someone who’s transparent, that want someone who’s going to educate them on what art collecting is and who is going to build a holistic collection for them and give them exceptional after service as well.
We explain to them how to structure their collection and how to structure their purchases. We connect them to the right lawyers to to deal with their family offices. Get them the right connection to the top insurance people in the art world. Connect them to the right banks that are going to be doing art lending down the line. There’s a lot more to building and managing an art collection for a new collector than just buying and selling art. I think, because of those reasons, we had a really interesting and overwhelming response from people that haven’t found the service in the art world whatsoever. The traditional art advisors are still the top art advisors in the world, they’re still running the art world in a pretty opaque manner, but we’ve since transgressed into a world where information is very easily available through the internet, through ChatGPT, through Google. People want to have that extra information from you, they want to see that extra effort from the art advisors.
I would say that 90 percent of our clients, whether it be top-end clients that are buying multi-million dollar artworks, or whether it be clients that are buying artworks in the $10,000 to $20,000 range, are people that are interested in building this asset class for themselves, but don’t know who to go to, because there’s no big organization that’s doing this in a very clean, transparent corporate manner that has access.
We talked about how there’s a lack of public documentation regarding things like shipping and insurance, or the upcoming tariffs, as well as stuff like art installation and lending agreements. If you’re a new person, that process can feel overwhelming.
Not just overwhelming. It feels very secretive to a new generation of collectors. There has to be an extreme emphasis on providing information and education because we’ve had the same collectors for such a long time, and all of the art advisors are running behind those same collectors. That’s such a small pool. Somewhere along the line, a lot of art advisors have forgotten the importance of educating your clients. It became just about selling and purchasing artwork. I saw that when we interviewed art advisors (for Agency Art House) to walk clients through Art Basel and handle our clients that are coming.
There are a lot of art advisors, and this is probably because there’s no education to become an art advisor, right? There’s no certification. A lot of them didn’t understand that part of their job was first, to identify what exactly the client wanted, fiscally and aesthetically. Building an art collection from an aesthetic and passion point-of-view is an extension of yourself, right? When you’re building an art collection, you’re picking things that are very personal to you, and you’re building an art collection around your personal values. But then also, there is the fiscal part of it. What is your budget? What exactly is your risk management strategy? And then the other part—you change as a person, right? You’re not the same person every year or every couple of years or every 10 years. So your art collection is also a living, breathing, changing thing that changes as you change. Now you don’t want all the artworks in that collection to change, because you are also not completely changing as a human being, but some of the artworks you will want to change because they don’t connect with you as much anymore, or don’t talk to you as much as they once did, and you should be able to sell those artworks as an asset without losing value.
What is your documentation and process like for this initial phase of The Agency Art House? One of the biggest challenges, I imagine, is being both under-resourced and over-resourced when it comes to staffing for a collaboration of this scope.
When you reach out to The Agency Art House, you are first connected to me, and I set up a phone call, which is our discovery phone call to discover who you are as a person, who your mom is, your dad is, who your kids are, what’s your favorite color scheme, what are important things that you connect with, in terms of principles. What organizations you support, what’s important to you? And I hear all of those things and compile a questionnaire that we have. This entire process is meant to be very personal. There is a balance between us being a corporate organization, but also being a very personal organization. I first have a conversation with them, then after that I connect them to an art advisor.
I am an art advisor also at The Agency Art House, but outside of me, there are other art advisors that work with us, and I connect the client with the art advisor and I give them a brief about our phone call, and then the advisor create goes through all of the different galleries and creates an personalized PDF for the client according to all of the information, that’s curated specifically for them. After that, the client comes back to the art advisor, who becomes their point person of contact. This PDF is also approved by me. I can see every PDF that every art advisor is making so after the first PDF is sent, the client gives feedback, and then we send an even more detailed, personalized, curated PDF, until the client finds exactly the artwork that we are trying to get for them.
Building an art collection with The Agency Art House is not a race. It’s a marathon. Our goal is not to get our clients to buy 50 artworks in the first month. Our goal here is to build a long-term relationship with the client, where we get them the artworks that make sense for their collection in time, whether that’s buying an artwork every couple of months or every six months or every year, that depends on their fiscal strategy.
How are you managing the increasing fragmentation of the market and concerns from clients?
The Agency Art House is a service that’s accessible to people at all different price levels. That means, if you want to buy artworks at the $5,000 to $15,000 level, or at the $30 million to $60 million art level, we have people that are specialized in those exact fragments of the market.
Say you’re a collector, you come to me, we have our first conversation, and I understand that your initial budget to buy an artwork is something which in the art world is minimal, like $30,000. I will understand if your collection should be, according to your tastes and preferences, contemporary, if it should be post-war contemporary, what strata you’re in, and then I will connect you with an art advisor that specializes in those specific sectors of the market.
Whether you’re doing a two bedroom apartment in Coconut Grove in Miami, or you’re doing a $60 million house in Hollywood Hills, you are connected to the art advisor that knows the market and the sector that you are in the best. That also means that, as you grow and want to go into the next level of the market, we can always also reroute and connect you to a different art advisor that’s more suited to what your needs are as your collection changes. Our entire organization works as one organization, one ecosystem. The emphasis here is on service for the clients.
The idea is to provide value to clients where this value hasn’t been provided in the art world traditionally; this is a non-traditional art advisory. The biggest way that we’re non-traditional is that we are a part of the Agency, which is a large luxury brokerage. And the Agency is one organization. You know, it’s not franchised to many different sectors. Every single Agency office in the nation, every single agent that’s under the Agency has an option to connect with me and connect with me directly. And because they have an option to connect with me directly, they can connect their collectors and their clients who are purchasing houses directly, and that’s an additional level of service that they are providing to their clients as well. That’s one part that makes us unique. The second part of it is that our approach to building collections for people is very transparent. It’s very streamlined. The collectors always know we introduce them to the gallery. The collectors always know where the artwork is coming from. There’s complete transparency in terms of information. The third part, is that the service that we’re providing, even though we are treating it very corporately, is personal. Every single art advisor is talking to the clients on a personal level, and all of these art advisors are coming to me, and I am guiding them and telling them exactly what needs to be done with their clients and collectors. So I am a very big part of it, whether it is directly or indirectly, of every purchase that’s going through the Agency Art House.
How many art advisors did you start with?
We’re around the 50-ish mark of art advisors, approximately. We are not hiring them as full-time art advisors to be on our team. These art advisors still run their individual art advisory services. They are on a commission basis with us. They are contractors that are on contracts with us.
Since Art Basel Miami Beach was only a month after our launch, we are constantly looking at and speaking to new art advisors. The next big art fair is going to be Frieze LA. We’re going to have a lot more art advisors walking through with clients. We’ve already started discussing with clients that Frieze LA is coming up, and we started booking the time slots for walk throughs.
Something that’s very interesting and different we do for our clients is also during art fairs, we send them a preview. This year for Art Basel Miami Beach, I went through north of 150 PDFs a week to two weeks before the the art fair started. I reached out and leveraged our relationship with the galleries to get these first look PDFs, and our clients were given one comprehensive PDF of all of the top works that were personally selected by me way before the fair opened.
We also had something called the Art Basel Miami Beach Guide, which we are also going to have for every other fair that we walk clients through. This guide was very unique, and actually went viral, because it was not just about the art fairs, it was also about food, restaurants, and hotels to stay at. We also listed private parties and other things to do that were outside of just the art fair, because an art fair is a holistic experience.
What we are providing to our clients is an experience of the art world, not just, oh, come here, purchase art like you’re buying vegetables. That’s not what it is. This is a unique asset class; it’s a high-end asset class. It has experiences that no other asset class can provide. So we want to provide that those experiences to our clients.
