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Manuel López Oliva

THE ART DEALER

1. While it is not correct to make absolute the role the art dealer can have for the art and artists, we cannot deny its usefulness in a world where the image market and the artistic product works significantly. This role is part of the existing capitalist market relations and a participant in the process of transformation of national artistic works in collectable assets.
2. There have always been different vendors of the aesthetic: from the professional art expert to even one who projects her or his expertise as an owner or employee in a gallery, auction house or art consulting; from those who decide to become independent curator or market adviser to others that act as street dealer or reseller. They trade through a website for that purpose and combine the sale of the artistic with other options.  There are also those who sell backroom or constitute links between collectors and sellers or artists.  They carry out this activity from their jobs in museums, research centers and promotion agencies, business management and other areas of trade and finance.
3. Within all that business in art, there are those who are improvised, pirates, smugglers, extortionists, exploiters of the work of the artists, fake collectors, money launderers, architects of dirty business, investors cowering in beneficial actions of a cultural nature and opportunistic sellers. But there are also serious marketing professionals, educated with a peculiar business ethics, who defend the true art and support the development of genuine artistic languages.
4. When a seller acts with professionalism, morality, sense of justice and understanding of art that she or he trades, they become an essential agent to the life of the artists, to the high destiny of their doings, to the corresponding cultural economy and to the possibility of the necessary changes in the aesthetic. This must be the internal or external vendor inherent to the marketing of the Cuban artistic production.