Will the art rental market ever take off?
Subscription and rental schemes offer affordability and flexibility – but there are significant pitfalls too. By Madeleine Kramer
Rental and subscription services are everywhere – from music (Spotify) and film (Netflix) to fashion (Rent the Runway) and strollers (Strollme). In the past several years the art world has started to follow suit. Experimenting with flat-fee subscription models, rental schemes and “try before you buy” options, new companies are looking to radically transform the way collectors buy art. But just how novel are these supposed disruptors, and how do they distinguish themselves? What is the commercial feasibility of these projects, and what are their likely impacts on the budding art collector – not to mention the artists themselves?
Set up in 2021 by the artist-owners of London gallery The Sunday Painter, Gertrude is the latest and buzziest addition to the art rental sphere. The platform has been designed with an explicitly democratic aim: to expand access to great art. Co-founder and CEO Will Jarvis says the company’s mission is ‘to engage a wider audience via technology, transparency, affordable payment terms, and deep insight into artists' practices, and, in turn, support a broader and more diverse range of artists than can currently be supported by the existing commercial gallery-collector model’.
Potential collectors can rent artworks available on the platform for a minimum of three months, each month paying 3.3% of the total sales price. During this period the works remain publicly available for outright purchase by other buyers, although if an offer is made on a piece the renter is given first refusal on acquiring the work. After this period you can either return the work or continue renting it for nine additional months, at a higher rate of 10% of the sales price per month. At the end of the year, you will have paid for the work in full and will receive full ownership rights. Jarvis reports that ‘around 60% of subscriptions convert into a full acquisition of artwork’. Gertrude partners with The Sunday Painter and other commercial galleries to exhibit works in physical spaces while simultaneously promoting the works online. If a commercial gallery is interested in taking advantage of the site’s broad audience to advertise their own works, ‘Gertrude will promote and market the artworks and exhibition in return for 10% commission in the event of a sale’.
With a stylishly designed website complete with a trendy sans serif typeface and an accessible price point (works range from £50 to £12,000), Gertrude is aimed squarely at a digital-native audience with a taste for the ultra-contemporary. Unlike other art sales platforms, Gertrude looks explicitly to promote, and benefit financially, from the relationship with artists, offering plans for them to submit works and be ‘represented’ by Gertrude. This two-way profit model asks artists to choose between two plans costing £15 or £45 per month for their inclusion on the platform. In return, the artist has access to the Gertrude platform to offer works for rent and sale as well as other benefits, including yearly consultations and inclusion in gallery exhibitions. The overall cost of doing business for artists is less than with most traditional galleries, with Gertrude taking 30% (rather than the industry standard 50%) of any art sales.
‘Gertrude’s USP is that this is the first time respected industry insiders have created a route to access the cutting edge of contemporary art in a gentle, open-hearted, and inclusive way,’ says Jarvis. With just over two years in business, Gertrude may still be the new kid on the art subscription block – but with its hybrid model of online platform and in-person gallery space, and deep ties to the existing art establishment, it seems set to flourish.
Based in New York and founded in 2019 by Columbia Business School graduate Mio Asatani, Curina focuses more narrowly on a monthly subscription plan model. With over 1,500 works to choose from and flat-rate shipping for just $50, Curina is aimed at the cost-conscious millennial collector. Subscriptions range from $38 per month for a small work up to $348 per month for a larger painting. The flat monthly fee allows clients to try many artworks before committing to a purchase – an especially attractive offer for city-dwelling renters on the move. As with Gertrude, there is a minimum three-month rental period, with similar perks like the ability to put rentals fees towards the purchase of a work. While most of the artists are sought out by Curina’s in-house team, the service partners with Chelsea-based Kathryn Markel Gallery to supply around one fifth of the selection of works.
In interviews, Asatani has spoken about identifying a gap in the market for young professionals without the knowledge or time to explore brick-and-mortar galleries and navigate the intimidating process of asking about availability. Unlike The Sunday Painter, this start-up has something of an outsider’s perspective. The narrow focus on millennial women in the immediate vicinity of New York City is also a clear point of differentiation for the platform. For just $20 the company will even come and install a work for you, if you live in Manhattan. With Curina providing so many services at a low cost, it will be interesting to see how it scales.
It’s worth noting that Gertrude and Curina are hardly the first entrants to the art subscription business. In the early to mid 2010s there was a veritable boom in art rental subscription sphere. Back in 2011, Nahema Mehta (also a Columbia Business School alumna) launched Art Remba in New York City. Over ten years, the company cultivated relationships with artists and galleries to offer works to subscribers. With a focus on emerging and blue-chip contemporary and South-east Asian art, the site offered works in the five- to six-figure range – higher than Gertrude or Curina – with a rent-to-own model.
Mehta explains that she started the business with the belief that many ‘people wanted to collect art but were just too scared to do it – it was almost more of a psychological hurdle than anything else’. While she saw young professionals invest in watches, expensive vacations, and other luxury purchases, it seemed they needed more time and guidance when it came to art. The rental model gave potential collectors a psychological buffer so they could feel comfortable before making an investment. The idea paid off with Mehta reporting an 80% purchase rate after three months of rental.
The business transformed into an e-commerce platform following its acquisition in 2015 by Pernod Ricard, becoming Absolut Art. While the new business offered many more works for sale, the average price per work was lowered in keeping with Absolut’s brand identity, while the rental model pivoted towards a target audience of corporate clients. The online platform shuttered permanently in 2021.
Another forerunner in the rental space was Artsicle, founded in New York in 2010. In 2012, the New York Times designated Artsicle founders Alexis Tryon and Scott Carleton as ‘Gallerists to the People’, with rentals ranging from $25 to $65 a month and modest sales prices of $500 to $2,500. At its peak, the business represented some 6,500 artists. In a likely reach for greater profitability, Artsicle shifted in 2013 from subscriptions to a broader online space for ‘empowering artists to grow their own business’, only to shut down completely in 2017.
The history of the search for the next ‘Netflix for art’ is riddled with flash-in-the-pan ventures, many with impressive backing and support from art industry stalwarts. A 2015 Financial Times article heralded several now-closed enterprises including Artemus (co-founded by financier and art lending impresario Asher Edelman) and ArtMgt (focused on the film industry and interior designers). Even the San Francisco-based art rental venture Artify.it lasted just two years, despite securing funding from the likes of billionaire entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
Why do so many promising rental schemes seem to have burned brightly only to die out within a couple of years? The contemporary art market is fiercely resistant to change. The factors that make an artist successful are controlled mainly by a small group of resource-rich galleries, influential curators, and well-known institutional and private collectors. Outside of this closed system it is very difficult for young artists to break through, and for the merely art-curious to jump into the collecting ring.
Economies of scale are at play here, too – the less expensive the offering of a gallery, or an online platform sells, the less income it will bring in, unless the business is selling (or leasing) hundreds to thousands of pieces per year. Operating in crowded markets like New York and London is expensive, and logistics are costly whether you are photographing, cataloguing and shipping a piece that costs $5,000 or $500,000. With many of these new platforms taking far less than the standard 50% commission rate on rentals, the ultimate purchase of rented pieces is both more vital to their bottom line and still less advantageous than it would be for a traditional gallery.
Mehta adds that rental-based companies struggle with a low repeat purchase rate. She found that the sector with the most traction was corporate clients looking to fill offices and hotels with local artists, without burdening their balance sheets. Another complicating factor for rental start-ups is finding insurance that will cover the artworks moving frequently between different locations. In Mehta’s experience, many companies turned down policies for her company before she found one willing to create a new blanket solution.
Finally, perhaps the psychological dimension of feeling you are simply borrowing a work of art rather than owning it and cherishing it forever may simply not appeal to enough consumers long-term for these platforms to grow at scale. If this is the case, they are then dependent on art sales, bringing them potentially in direct competition with galleries and other art start-ups. Maybe that is not such a bad thing; the art world is in need of innovative ways to capture the imagination of the next generation of art collectors and patrons. Perhaps when we see art as something exchangeable and transitory, we assign it less value and take less responsibility for its care … but only time will tell.
Madeleine Kramer is a consultant and client strategist who has worked at Sotheby’s, White Cube, and Gagosian.