Most people meet the phrase "art advisor" somewhere between a fair and a first serious purchase, and nobody explains what the job is. It is not curation and it is not decoration. It is representation: someone on your side of the table when the other side does this every day and you do not.
The four things the job actually covers
Sourcing. Finding the work — including work that is not for sale in any public sense. Primary-market pieces are allocated, not listed: a gallery decides who gets one. An advisor is useful precisely because that decision is made on relationships.
Checking. Provenance, condition, authenticity, and whether the price makes sense against what comparable work has actually sold for rather than what it was asked for.
Negotiating. On price, but more often on terms — payment schedule, first refusal on the next body of work, whether the gallery will take the piece back if you change direction.
Everything after. Shipping, customs, insurance, framing, installation, and the valuation you will need for cover and for estate planning.
How advisors are paid, and why you should ask
There are three models and they are not equivalent. A commission on the purchase — typically a percentage of the price — aligns the advisor with the transaction happening. A flat or retainer fee aligns them with the advice. An introduction fee paid by the seller is common and perfectly legitimate, but you should be told about it.
The question worth asking any advisor, including us: who pays you, and does anyone else pay you on this transaction? An advisor who will not answer that plainly is telling you something.
When you do not need one
If you know the artist, the gallery already sells to you, and the price is published, an advisor adds cost and a step. Buy it yourself.
If you are buying under a few thousand pounds, the fee structure rarely makes sense. Go to the fair, talk to the booth, trust your eye.
Where an advisor earns their keep is the opposite case: a name you cannot get near, a secondary-market piece with a complicated history, a cross-border purchase with tax and shipping consequences, or a collection that needs a plan rather than another picture.
How our desk works
We handle valuation, acquisition and sale. The brief comes to us, we run it, and the regulated execution — identity and source-of-funds checks, the paperwork a sale requires — is completed by the specialist we place it with. We never hold the work and we never hold the money.
Our relationships are deepest in contemporary African art: Lagos, Accra, Dakar, Cape Town and the diaspora studios in London and Lisbon. We also source outside our own membership — if you are not a client and want a specific work found, ask.