Art Market Veterinary Super Group Consultation to Solve Elite Problems
The art market isn’t completely ruined, but in the eyes of art market veterans Ed Dolman, Alex Dolman, Brett Gorvy, Philip Hoffman and Patti Wong, it doesn’t work as it used to be. New Perspective Arts Partners (NPAP) announced Thursday that the group aims to change that with a new collaborative consulting firm (NPAP).
Consulting companies don’t operate like normal companies: every partner keeps their day-to-day work and they only assemble when advanced professional issues that need to be solved. Think of it as an Avenger, but for the art world.
“We are not only another consultant,” Govey told Artnews By phone earlier this week. “It’s more like a McKinsey model, a team that blends problems and solves problems.”
NPAP is not just about selling it simply. Instead, it will provide collectors, trustees and home offices with advice on how to manage, grow or disperse important collections of global context and institutional muscles. A major selling point is the group’s profound experience in various markets, from auction houses and top galleries to institutions and high-end consulting, and a geographical footprint across Hong Kong to Doha.
Both Gorvy and Dolman admit that the current art market is at a turning point. “We are not starting at a boom moment,” Govey said. “We are starting with a market that has become complicated.”
Dolman noted that the proliferation of third-party guarantees, the decline in resale premiums and regional splits serve as evidence of a “paragraph shift” in the auction market, with the largest homes becoming “a victim of their own success.”
“The direct business in the past became very complex,” Dorman said. “That auction model used to be full of surprises and upside, now it feels stiff – design is more risky than serving buyers.”
Gorvy shows that the market split and growing complexity create a vacancy.
“The tested platforms are all showing signs of failure, or at least exhausted,” Govey said. “But chaos creates opportunities. If you can help customers browse it, you can add real value.”
The partners say NPAP draws strength not only from its flexible structure, but also from the chemistry behind it. Dolman and Hoffman have known each other since the early 1990s. Gorvy worked closely with Dolman in the early 2000s. Although Patti Wong is a long-time competitor, she led Sotheby’s Asia and Gorvy serves as Christie’s chairman and director of international post-war and contemporary art, Gorvy always admires her from afar.
“I’m jealous of her power in the market,” he said.
Both Gorvy and Dolman stressed that discretion was integrated into the consulting firm’s model. There is no brand building exercise, no junior staff scrambling to make consignment quotas.
“Relevance is something we keep coming back to,” Govey said. “What is the relationship with collectors now? What is the relationship with institutions? What is the relationship with trustees?”
