20 Art World Power Players You Need to Know

As with most creative industries, making a name for yourself in the art world is less about what you know and more about who you know. Yes, talent will always be the first prerequisite, but there’s something to be said for being at the right place at the right time and shaking hands with the right person—the gallerist who might launch your next show, the art advisor who will turn her high-powered clients onto your work, or that burgeoning collector who can help make the value of your work skyrocket.

Chances are that you’ve probably already rubbed shoulders with one of the art world’s most important power players, particularly if you regularly attend gallery openings or travel to major industry gatherings like Art Basel. You just need to know who it is you’re looking for. Fortunately, we’ve done the legwork for you. These are the 20 Art World Power Players You Need to Know.

Location: Los Angeles

Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight lives and breathes art. When he’s not penning stories on art world happenings or reviews of the latest openings, the three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist has served as an expert for shows like 60 Minutes and All Things Considered and is a dedicated tweeter. Translation: one nod of approval from this guy and you’re golden.

Location: New York

A curator for the Twitter age, Lindsay Howard has a dedicated interest in exploring the intersection between art and technology, particularly as it relates to the Web. In 2010 she founded the exhibition program at Brooklyn's 319 Scholes Gallery, which has created opportunities for more than 300 artists. She has curated exhibitions for a global roster of institutions, including Pittsburgh's Fe Gallery and New York's Phillips Auction House, where she produced the house's first digital art auction that received major accolades from WIRED, Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Forbes, and beyond.

Location: Los Angeles

In 2004, Katie Cromwell and Jensen Karp opened up what just may be the country's coolest gallery when they co-founded Los Angeles' Gallery 1988, a pop culture-focused space that has curated shows to pay tribute to everything from Ghostbusters to Step Brothers. In the decade since, they've gained a massive legion of A-list followers—Jessica Alba, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Samuel L. Jackson, Swizz Beatz, and Joss Whedon are among the folks who have been seen browsing the galleries (in 2011, they opened a second location in Venice Beach)—making Cromwell and Karp the total cool kids of the L.A. art world.

Location: New York

Julia Kaganskiy has a way with both words and technology, and she's been using those talents to help bring art to the public on a much more massive scale throughout her career, which has included roles as the global editor of The Creators Project, VICE's arts initiative that showcases the ways in which technology is changing creativity; founder of The New York Times' monthly #ArtsTech meetup; and co-founder and curator of the pop-up Blue Box Gallery. But all of this has just been leading up to Kaganskiy's newest role as director of the New Museum's art, technology, and design incubator. It's no wonder Fast Company named her one of the most influential women in technology.

Location: New York

Amazing things can happen when art and technology come together. In the case of Carter Cleveland, this powerful combo resulted in Artsy, the heavily traveled website where making “all the world's art accessible to anyone with an Internet connection” is the official mission statement. And the site's millions of regular users have Cleveland, a computer science engineer from Princeton with a lifelong passion for fine art, to thank for that.

Location: New York

Art runs in the family of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, whose father—Ronald K. Greenberg—is owner of The Greenberg Gallery in St. Louis, one of the area’s first contemporary art galleries. But Greenberg Rohatyn has made a name for herself on the New York City art scene, where she has three outposts of Salon 94, sits on the selection committee of Frieze New York, and chairs the board of directors of Performa, which produces New York’s performance art biennial.

Location: Los Angeles

Los Angeles—and the art world at large—has Eli Broad to thank for turning the city into one of the world’s art capitals. Though he’s a straight-up entrepreneur by trade, the arts have benefited from his success in the Fortune 500 world as he’s been a huge supporter of the arts for more than 40 years. He’s a founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, a trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a major supporter of the Los Angeles Opera. All told, it’s estimated that Broad has donated more than $800 million to improving the cultural scene in Los Angeles. Not bad!

Location: New York

Last year proved to be a major turning point in the career of Andrea Glimcher when she and then-husband Marc Glimcher announced that they would be divorcing after a decade of marriage. During that time, the couple had worked side-by-side at the world-renowned Pace Gallery, which Marc’s father founded. As the gallery’s director, Andrea had managed to keep the space in the headlines by arranging events like Jay Z’s “Picasso Baby” performance art video. She’s shifted that experience into a new venture, Hyphen, an art consulting company that will plan the art at British architect Norman Foster’s newly designed 425 Park Avenue as one of its first projects.

Location: New York

As an art historian, writer, critic, curator, and professor, RoseLee Goldberg has got every corner of the art market covered. She’s channeled these various talents into Performa, a multidisciplinary nonprofit arts organization that aims to inspire fellow artists and educate its audience with a lineup of cutting-edge material like MEEM: A Story Ballet About the Internet, Ryan McNamara’s recent commission. Its main event, however, is its biennial, which Goldberg believes “will provide audiences with a highly selected overview of the most outstanding work and will, at the same time, show the relevance of live art as an innovative and important contemporary form.”

Location: New York

If you want to see your work at MoMA, Klaus Biesenbach is the man to know. While he still maintains strong ties to his native Germany, where he founded Berlin’s Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in 1991 and the established then Berlin Biennale in 1996 (and remains founding director of both), he’s been a major force at MoMA for nearly 20 years. Originally hired as a part-time curator at MoMA PS1 in 1996, Biesenbach today serves as the Queens institute’s director, where he has been responsible for the organization of such ground-breaking exhibitions as Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present. He’s also the chief curator at large for The Museum of Modern Art.

Location: London

Alongside Matthew Slotover, Amanda Sharp has taken her appreciation for the world’s finest contemporary artists from the page into the real world. As co-founders of frieze, a London-based contemporary art magazine founded in 1991, the duo branched out in 2003 to launch Frieze Art Fair, a key event of the London art world that takes place each October in Regent’s Park and focuses on living contemporary artists. The event’s success led to the creation of two new events, Frieze New York and Frieze Masters, which have only gained Sharp a greater standing in the global art market.

Location: New York

From New York City to Venice, Massimiliano Gioni has got his finger on the pulse of the international art scene. Stateside, he keeps busy as both a curator and critic of contemporary art, and serves as the associate director and director of exhibitions at the New Museum, where he has overseen a variety of signature group exhibitions, including Younger Than Jesus and Ostalgia. In his native Italy, Gioni serves as the artistic director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes contemporary culture in Milan, and took on the coveted role of curator of the 55th Venice Biennale.

Location: Rome, New York & Kassel, Germany

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev got an early start in the art world, having moved to Rome shortly after her graduation from the University of Pisa to serve as an art critic. Her penchant for avant-garde work of the early 20th century and contemporary works helped to set her apart and served as a launch pad for a career as a curator, where she has helped to discover new talents for a wide range of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including New York’s MoMA PS1 and the Castello di Rivoli Museum in Turin, Italy. In 2012, she was named artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13), one of the world’s most prestigious contemporary art exhibitions, which attracted close to one million visitors.

Location: Basel, Miami Beach & Hong Kong

In the art fair world, there are few phrases more prestigious than “Art Basel.” And if you’re looking to have your work showcased at any of the behemoth exhibition’s trio of shows—the original in Switzerland, balmy Miami Beach, or newcomer Hong Kong—Marc Spiegler is the man you’ll need to impress. As Art Basel’s director, Spiegler is tasked with management the show’s global development, but he’s hardly just a business mind. Before taking on the top position at Art Basel, Spiegler spent more than a decade as a journalist, where he wrote about art, sure, but also pop culture, video games, technology, the Internet, politics, and society. Though he has since moved on, his writing website is still active, and makes for a fun read.

Location: New York

As one of the first names in art criticism, Roberta Smith—who also lectures on the topic of contemporary art—has been making her opinions known for several decades now, first as a writer for Artforum, Art in America, and The Village Voice. Since 1986, she has called the New York Times home and currently serves as its co-chief art critic, which must make for some pretty interesting discussions around the dinner table, as she’s married to Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine’s senior art critic.

Location: New York

Even the most casual of art fans know the name Larry Gagosian, whose beginnings in the art world began in the most commercial of ways when he set up a poster shop near the campus of his alma mater, UCLA. From there, he made the leap to selling prints by the likes of artists such as Diane Arbus and from there began to attract the attention of emerging contemporary artists in the area. He opened his first gallery in 1978, which promoted the work of (then) up-and-coming artists including Cindy Sherman and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It didn’t take long for the art world to recognize Gagosian was a man with an eye for talent. Today, he remains one of the world’s preeminent art dealers and his titular Gagosian Gallery chain now boasts 14 locations around the world, from Beverly Hills to Athens.

Location: New York

Though she's been described as an “award-winning interior designer, author, curator and authority on why, where, when, and how to display and mix contemporary art and interior design in any environment,” Maria Gabriela Brito is all that and a whole lot more, especially to the long line of A-list celebrity art collectors she advises, including Gwyneth Paltrow (who apparently has a thing for street art) and Diddy, for whom she has helped to procure pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Ai Weiwei.

Location: London

Reality stars and A-list celebrities may be considered unofficial royalty in America, but in England it’s the art superstars who get all the accolades. Case in point: Nicholas Serota, the former director of London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery and The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford who was named director of the Tate in 1988 was knighted in 1999. (That’s Sir Nicholas Serota to you.)

Location: Doha, Qatar

Don’t let her tender age of 31 fool you: Sheikha Al-Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani of Qatar is just about one of the most powerful people you’re likely to find in today’s global art world, and it’s not just because she’s got an annual art budget of about $1 billion. She’s got an eye for talent, even if she does have a preference for the masters (she paid $250 million for Cezanne’s The Card Players, not to mention $310 million for 11 pieces by Mark Rothko.) But it’s all in the name of business, as she’s the founder and chairperson of Qatar Museums & Doha Film Institute.

Location: New York

David Zwirner has been lauded by both Forbes and ArtReview as one of the world’s most powerful art dealers, and rightfully so. As owner of David Zwirner Gallery, which has two locations in New York and one in London, Zwirner has been entrusted to represent the works of some of today’s most important artists of varying disciplines, everyone from Jeff Koons to Robert Crumb.