Art For the Artist's Sake

It was in France around the middle of the 19th century that the role of artists' representative took root. Before that if you were an artist and wanted to be successful you had to be a good business person, doing your own promoting, taking care of marketing, keeping the books, and so on. There were actually laws in the middle ages that made the "middle man" illegal. If you were going to sell for a profit a product created by another person, you had to do something to it to increase the value by the amount you were adding. But once gallery owners took over from the artist the business of selling their paintings for them, the artists retreated to their garrets and learned to disdain the marketplace that made their survival possible. The idea of actors having agents began in the 20th century. Originally the agents were just bookers, providing vaudeville acts to theatres across the country. Louis B. Mayer invented the actor's agent. When movies became popular his relatives flocked to Hollywood and he gave them jobs in his studio. But eventually there were too many of them, so he set them up as agents and insisted that his actors who were under contract have representation. Thus the actors had to pony up 10% each to sustain Mayer's myriad cousins, nephews, great-nephews, in-laws, and so on. Brilliant!