I became a Gmail art advisor

As Saturday night slips into Sunday morning, a dear friend comes to me with a serious problem. He staggers out of the toilet of our local pub. Wild-eyed, red-nosed, looking a little worse for wear. “I need money, fast,” he snaps. There’s a cash point over the road, I remind him. No, that won’t work. He needs money. This is news to me. For some years now he’s been living off the gains of his pandemic-era crypto trading. At some point, he decided to get into art flipping. Everyone else was doing it. So when Damien Hirst released a combination NFT and print edition, The Empresses, he snapped up a piece, a Taytu Betul, and waited for the right moment to sell. Two years have since passed, and while he’s exited crypto, he’s hung onto the Hirst, and now his flip was looking much more like a flop – a red, dead albatross hanging heavy around his neck.

“You’ve got to help me sell it, I’m hopeless,” he says, or words to that effect. The desperation in his voice is sickening. “You know what you’re doing… you know about art.” Yes, but I’m a writer. I don’t know about the market, I don’t have clients. I’ve never even worked in sales unless you count pulling pints and placing second-hand coats on eBay. But what can I do? I have to help him out. And the more I think about it, the more interesting it sounds. After all, how hard could it be? It’s not like there’s any regulation in the art market: no qualifications required and no code of ethics to follow. Anyone can set themselves up as an advisor or a dealer and get cracking. Many already do: there’s even a derogatory nickname for them: the Gmail Art Advisor. Everyone loves to hate them. Anyway, besides helping my friend, I’d be helping myself. I’d only need to flip a few masterpieces before I could retire. I’d learn everything I need to know on the job. My mind is made up. Sure, of course I’ll help. What do you want for it? “£3,000,” he said, “by Friday.” One week in the art market, easy.

Monday

Monday morning. Uneasy dreams. I feel myself falling into a pit of despair. What have I agreed to? £3,000 by the end of the week? Madness. I’ve never made that kind of money. I don’t know where to start. I clear my head with a cold shower and a hot coffee and quickly realise that before I make any moves, I will need some advice from real art advisors. A cursory search for “how find art advisors uk” and a few desperate emails and I spend my entire commute praying for some kind of miracle. Turns out somebody was looking down on me. When I arrive at the office I have a message in my inbox telling me to call.

Jane Suitor is a consultant in modern and contemporary art. She set herself up in London in the 1990s and works with a number of galleries, including Chisenhale, Studio Voltaire and the Serpentine Gallery, as well as advising numerous VIP clients. Lucky for me, Jane is happy to take ten minutes out of her schedule to chat. Though, I’m worried by what she tells me: it turns out I’d just missed out on the best opportunity of the year to meet buyers, Art Basel. “You should have been hanging out all last week at the Three Kings, you could have met a lot of dealers and art consultants and artists and shown them your wares!” She’s shocked by my idea to go knocking on gallery doors, “cold calling like a double glazing salesman!?”

Jane corrects my game plan. “You’re going to look at previous auction prices and you’re going to speak to dealers who deal in Damien Hirst markets, and you’re going to work out exactly what you should be charging for the piece. You’ll take a small fee for selling it for your client. No more than 10%.” She emphasises transparency, “You have to work in the best manner to look after your client. Your client comes first because your client will be buying or selling with you, hopefully again and again.” Importantly, she gives me some much-needed words of encouragement. “You’re going to feel extremely satisfied when you’ve completed your first deal… You’re gonna do it. You’re gonna do it with great tenacity and humour, and you’re gonna think of an innovative way of selling it. I’m certain!” One last thing before she hangs up, “Let me know your outcome!”

Tuesday

One thing I notice when researching art advisors is the look. While my Levis and button-downs are perfectly fine for a day in the office, I’ll be wining and dining with ultra-high-net-worth individuals. More importantly, to understand the art advisor, one must become the art advisor. If I am to make it in this game, I’ll have to look the part. There seem to be two camps: fashionable and flamboyant and old and fusty. I opt for a middle-of-the-road look: rimless glasses and a grey two-piece suit. Smart, serious, restrained, discreet. A Swiss bank personified.

I can’t moonlight on my Plaster email, and more to the point, what’s a Gmail art advisor without a Gmail account? On my call with Jane, I’d pointed out that ‘Jacob Wilson’, while a perfectly good name, perhaps didn’t give off the international, cultured, pseudo-aristo vibe I was looking for. Perhaps I should change it? While Jane isn’t sure about ‘borrowing’ of an aristocratic title, she suggests something equally attention-grabbing: “How about Jacob Philbrick?” Oh right, so I’ll adopt my new name and fire off an email to my client, who will immediately suspect a scam and blacklist me. I went with the next best option, boring, staid and dependable: Jacob Wilson Fine Art. I guess it’s all about building trust.

The final flourish to prove I’m serious about this business is the seemingly obligatory semi-legalese email signature. Then the prompt to not print emails. Does anyone even print emails any more? Who knows, no time to check. I’ll just add it anyway.

I spend the rest of the day, and most of the evening, trying to add an ‘international school’ lilt to my accent. That perfect amalgamation of Swiss German, Parisian French, Waspish American and received pronunciation that instantly marks its speaker as someone equally at home in Gstaad as in Shanghai.

Wednesday

My plan to use my old university’s library to research past auction results falls through when I find out that auction houses no longer print catalogues. Instead, I sign up to each auction house and use their poorly-designed, data-scraping websites. Utterly tedious. I quickly learn why most people prefer to use the result aggregators. Artsy is free to access, and as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. The results aren’t comprehensive and are sometimes incorrect. Artnet Auctions, while extensive and accurate, is poorly designed and expensive (£21.50 for a day pass, which I skip by applying a promo code).

I log all the results in a spreadsheet. I can see how they’re trending over time, but also which of the series are over or underperforming. While hours of data entry wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I said I’d help sell an artwork – I had thought of languid tennis matches and liquid lunches – needs must. By the end of the morning, I have enough data to draw some graphs.

The data isn’t pretty. It looks like my client has missed the chance to make bank. He should have sold the work around mid-2023, around a year after he bought the work. Now, the best he can do is cut his losses.

I ring him up and lay out the info. “For speed and simplicity, we’ll aim for a private sale. That’ll save you and me, time and money. At the moment, there are a lot of Empresses on the market, but not so many of your edition, so I suggest that we try and find someone who’s building up a set. Now the difficult part. In terms of the price, the market’s a little nervous right now and we’re ahead of the summer lull, but these things pass. At the moment we’re looking at £2,500, not including my fee of 10%. We’ll say £3,000 and negotiate down from there. At the end of the day, whatever happens, we’ll get a good deal and whoever bites will feel like they’re getting a good deal.” It’s not the easiest call to make, but what other options do we have?

Your network is your net worth. Or so the saying goes. My first move is to activate that latent wealth. I post on my core group chat; the one which brings together my ride and dies, and all I receive in return is insults and mockery.

Time to expand my network. I call in favours from the accumulation of university friends, former colleagues, auction specialists, PRs, journalists, gallerists, artists, curators, old flames, smoking area randoms and spam accounts that make up my instagram followers, trying to find anyone who might be interested in the work. I send out pictures and field responses asking for dimensions, weights, certificates of authenticity and close-ups. Again, it’s a case of some positives and many negatives. I know it’s unlikely a deal will be closed within the day, so I put the messages on the back burner and start contacting galleries.

Sadly, around half of the galleries I email don’t get back to me. Am I beneath them? Or have I simply ended up in their spam folder? On reflection, better to be ignored than insulted, as I am by a handful of respondents. One gallery tells me to piss off (in so many words). Another tells me curtly (and incorrectly) that similar pieces are listed on eBay for less than £2,000. A third values the work at £500, and passes. But more disconcerting than discourteous are the galleries that told me they already have several examples in stock. One gallery on the outer edge of London tells me they have five full sets and aren’t looking to buy any more.

Thursday

Jane had mocked my idea of door to door art sales, but I’m worried my cold call emails are putting people off. To them, I’m just a name in an inbox, one of hundreds vying for attention. I need to get out and about, I need to be seen on the streets and sealing deals with firm handshakes. I take a walk around Mayfair.

At the first gallery I go to, the gallery assistant is very polite and professional even as I interrupt his lunch. I write down the details of the work, and fair play to him, he tried to upsell me on another work. He can’t promise anything, but he’s going to pass the details onto the team, who might be in touch later today. Finally, I’m getting somewhere.

The next two galleries turn me down. The one after that turns out not to be a gallery, but an individual dealer who is simply making his business out to be larger than it is. He also has a full set of Empresses as well as an extra, and he isn’t interested in collecting any more. He tells me the sale will be a tough one, and says that it might be worth listing it on eBay.

The next gallery offers similar advice. The gallery manager meets me in the entrance hall and her eyes light up when I say I have a Hirst to sell. “Do you happen to have any pictures?” Yes, I say, and whip my phone out. It’s one of the Empresses… I add with a sideways glance. An emphatic “NO” bursts from the manager’s mouth. She seems as shocked as I do. They also have six in stock and aren’t looking for any more. Try eBay? She says.

I slink back into the sunbaked streets and wander aimlessly. No matter which turn I took, it feel like I’m travelling back to square one. What am I doing? I’m out there pounding the pavement and I hadn’t heard back from anyone. Meanwhile, all around me, seemingly everyone’s enjoying pints in the sun. I’m hit by a one-two punch of realisation. One: I’m beginning to seriously doubt that I could make it as a dealer. Two: even if I do pull it off, I’d probably spend more time on phone calls and in meetings than on yachts.

Back at the office, I make time to email the big auction houses. I know this is a long shot. I won’t be able to meet the deadline, but perhaps the higher hammer prices at auction will make up for delays. Sotheby’s valued the work between £1,500-£2,000. Worse, they don’t take artworks under £5,000. Bonhams offered the same… for a September sale. No chance. Tennants offered £1,000-2,000. Great, under value and over deadline. There was no way either my client or I would accept these offers. And the others: Christie’s, Phillips, Rosebery’s… I’ll never know.

Friday

I’m getting desperate. I’ve been following a lead on a serious Hirst collector, but he’s just backed out. “They sold so many of them,” he says. He’s not wrong. I remember Jane’s words, that she was sure I could come up with an innovative way of selling this work. I resolve to take a step out of the conventional art market.

One of my contacts gets back to me, suggesting I join the HENI Discord channel – if you’ve never used Discord, think of a Fisher-Price version of Slack, all soft rounded corners and garish colours. Unsurprisingly it’s popular with gamers and crypto nerds – “that’s where all the ‘damo’ fans hang out,” my contact said. If I couldn’t sell to them, who could I sell to…? It turns out, not them. I logged on and found them too busy sharing screenshots – Ai Weiwei Coca-Cola vases, Bridget Riley prints, Grayson Perry editions, Banksys, Thierry Noirs, Ron Englishes, Tristan Eatons, and George Condos, all interspersed with grainy reaction gifs scraped from episodes of The Office (the US version) and The Inbetweeners (UK version) – to care about my sale offer.

So where do you go where there’s nowhere left to turn? A pawnbroker. I call up one based on Hatton Garden, a City of London street, far from the fine art of Mayfair and Fitzrovia, known for its pawnbrokers, watch dealers, diamond and jewellery traders, and a major heist back in 2015. It turns out few pawnbrokers deal in objet d’art. I guess they don’t fancy taking the risk. The process is familiar to me now: the piqued interest when I say I have something to sell, the brief elation when I reveal the name, the slow realisation when I give the title, and the furrowed brow and the softening of the voice as they inform me that, unfortunately, they don’t deal with works of this value. Though the man I spoke to made an exception, given the familiarity of Hirst’s name. He offered me “around” £2,000 for the work. His voice was shaking. I’d already told him that my friend had paid well over that for the piece. I said I’d think about it. But really, that was probably the best deal I’d been given.

All this time I’d been focussed on the art market, yet I’d neglected to consider an actual market. If I could only get the buyers face-to-face with the work, they’d be certain to make an offer. There are a lot of second-hand and car boot markets across the city, but at Nine Elms, you’ll find anything, anything, for sale. I checked to see if I could place the Hirst amongst the ‘second-hand’ tools and BBQ stalls. However, it turns out that they have stricter requirements for trading than many art dealers: ID, proof of address, public liability insurance. There’s no way I can gather that together by the end of the day.

Just as I’m thinking over my options, a message comes in. “I think I might have your guy.” The contact who’s messaged me knows his stuff. I don’t doubt the seriousness. I play it cool, calm and collected. “Great,” I reply. “Can you get me a photo + measurements?” He’s sizing it up, he’s thinking about transport. He’s keen. I keep my cool, “Sure, I’ll email.” The messages that follow feel like a delicate dance. The potential buyer, anonymous, is in London in a month’s time. He’s offering a decent amount, not exactly what my client expects, but not far off. Not far at all. I think about trying to push him up, then about cutting my own commission, I could match what he’s offering if I took nothing. It’s not ideal, but, taking Jane’s advice, it might please my client.

In a final fit of desperation, I fall back onto what I know best. I list the damn thing on eBay – and Depop for good measure. I Immediately receive two spam messages.

Friday, 5pm. I have the calm serenity and clarity of vision of a person looking down a long tunnel towards a shining spot of light. I am at the end of the road. I ring up Jane for a little guidance on how to break the bad news to my client. Even at this late hour, she was more than happy to help and offered some sage advice. “You want to protect your relationship with your client,” she says. “Explain to them that you feel the market is down at the moment, and with interest rates running so high there’s a lot less interest in the art market. Explain that sadly, you haven’t been able to place it.” She tells me to do the deed in-person or over the phone. Give it a personal touch. Jane gave me a much-needed confidence boost: “You want them to have absolute faith in you: you’re very knowledgeable, you’re very gifted, you’re very established in the art world. You want your client to always think of you first when they’re buying or selling a work of art. You just haven’t been able to place this because, let’s face it, the art market is a little bit nervous at the moment.”

This is the part of the job that nobody likes: I ring up my friend. “How about a drink, it’s on me.” And we end up back at the start, back at the pub where this ludicrous journey began. Five days and nothing to show for it. Even if I had sold it, in the best-case scenario I’d have made around £250. In other words, £50 per day. I’d earn more washing pint pots. Still, I do my best to spin the situation. “It’s not that ugly… you can enjoy it for another six, maybe 18 months!” It looks like he’s about to cry.

What have I done? In the search for short term gains I’d nearly destroyed one of my closest friendships. Money is money, but honesty, transparency, openness is the most valuable service an art advisor can provide. We’ve all seen what can happen when an art advisor gets focusses on a get-rich-quick scheme over their duty to their client.

Thankfully, by the end of the night we’d worked it all out. The good news is we’re still friends. The bad news is, after buying my friend his consolation pint I’m now down nearly £7. So, don’t forget to check out my listings on Ebay or Depop. Shipping extra, no refunds, no swaps x.