10 Behind-The-Scenes Art World Insiders You Should Know

Image via Complex Original

Amanda Sharp, along with her founding partner Matthew Slotover (publisher of the fair’s eponymous magazine), founded the Frieze Art Fair in London in 1991. As she told Paper Magazine earlier this year, she had no idea the annual event would be part and parcel to reenergizing London as a global art center and attracting attention to the first-wave Young British Artists in the early nineties. But it did just that, while simultaneously bolstering the magazine they named the fair for. Now, more than 20 years on, Frieze has expanded to incorporate a New York City iteration of the fair—a global reach.

Spiegler has worn many hats. Though he’s been in top leadership positions for Art Basel since 2007, he was a prominent writer and journalist for more than 10 years prior. He covered a number of issues, including (of course) the art market. But he also branched out into topics as vast as technology, cultural criticism, and politics. This was after creating an immense body of work on architecture and design. His writing, such his piece as “Do Art Critics Still Matter?” is essential, as is his guidance of Art Basel. He became the head chair of the three fairs (Basel, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Miami, Florida) last year.

Jeff Koons may be one of the richest, most well-known, and (sometimes) respected artists in the world at this point, a position about to be bolstered with no small thanks to Lady Gaga. But his massive studio runs at a industrial-line clip. Koons’s version of The Factory employs 87 different assistants on shifts—someone’s got to handle all those employees. That responsibility falls to Gary McCraw, the studio manager for Mr. Koons. Considering the huge size of the staff, the immensity of Koons’s work, at the commitment to quality, this is no small feat for McCraw—he ends up wielding as much influence over the work as Koons himself.

Serota’s been a vibrant presence as the director of the Tate Modern since 1988. He’s not only navigated the museum through a tightening of government funding, but also myriad financial crises in the private sector. His interest and commitment to more contemporary art has led Tate into more progressive works, including the Tanks, a facility dedicated entirely to performance art and works of film. He’s not only forward thinking, he’s pragmatic and prescient—and a name you should know.

At the expense of Ai Weiwei’s dissident art-making practices comes quite a bit of legal pressure from the Chinese government. Weiwei has been arrested numerous times, for a variety of things. And, whenever this happens, Liu Xiaoyuan has had his back as his lawyer over the years. This is less than a trivial position, considering just how often Weiwei finds himself in trouble. In April 2011, the government accused him of tax evasion. This led to the disappearance of not the artist, but of the lawyer himself (it was part of a larger government crackdown on human rights lawyers). Regardless if you know the name or not, Liu Xiaoyuan is a distinctive force behind the scenes, fighting for the rights of Weiwei and, by proxy, artists and humanitarians all over China.

The Armory Show is the largest art fair in New York City, held annually in massive piers on the west side of Manhattan. Horowitz joined in 2011 helping to guide the creative direction of the current iteration of the show. That would include the 2014 iteration, that focuses on Chinese artists. But he’s more than just a Ph.D—he’s written extensively on art for places as various as The New York Times and The Observer. He’s not the fair’s head honcho, but he’s a brilliant mind waiting in the wings.

There is a rapidly expanding art movement in the Middle East, particularly in Dubai, where the wealth of some citizens seems to outsize even the massive buildings there. Perhaps that is, in part, what’s led to such a creative flourish—the flux of patrons ready to toss off their disposable incomes. Perhaps that insight is what led Benedict Floyd, whose background is largely in investment banking, to help found this rapidly popularizing art fair. Art Dubai is quickly becoming the center of the arts movement in the region, launching a number of prizes, forums, and art actions. We have Floyd to thank.

One of the preeminent galleries in the world, White Cube is one of the few spaces to not have a named attached to it—rather, nothing describes any gallery better than “a white cube.” Jay Jopling is the man behind the most infamous of the white cubes, the place where artists like Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin got their start. He continues helping to forge the vanguard of not just British art, but international work—he’s opening a new space in Brazil and tailoring a roster of internationally renowned artists. He also got his start as a salesman selling fire extinguishers door-to-door. Sure, he comes from a high station socially, but such a strange, humble start keeps us thinking he’s quite down to earth.

She’s one of the most well-regarded art historians in the world, but has been responsible for curating some of the most important global art exhibitions of the last 20 years. These include tenures at New York’s MOMA P.S. 1, the Castello di Rivoli Museum in Turin, Italy, and as the Artistic Director of the Biennale of Sydney in 2008. In 2012, her work as a curator was so well-received, she was named No. 1 on Art Review’s annual Power 100 list of players in the art world. It is her work as director of dOCUMENTA13 that really showcased her talents, however. With a theme of “Collapse and Recovery,” it was one of the most remarkable iterations of the annual contemporary exhibition thus far.

This trio of tech-art entrepreneurs did something remarkable last year, by taking ownership of the .art domains at large, putting up id="mce_marker"85,000 of their own funds simply to apply to take control. But instead of simply using that resource to their own means, resolved to give 10 percent of all earnings from the prospective over into art projects. The e-flux collective, which was founded by the three in 1999, has also been massively important to the international art community. A network of news digests and other communications, e-flux has distributed more information about contemporary art in the last 14 years than just about any other resource.