About
A space for thinking about artist and collector estates
This platform grew out of taking responsibility for an artist’s estate and a collector’s estate. It speaks to people facing similar questions — and looking to find their own, responsible way of handling them.
Position
Every estate needs its own answers
Responsibility for an estate is often taken on without anyone being prepared for it. Questions arise that go far beyond ordering and preserving.
What needs visibility? What should stay together? What role does the market play — and what part do museums, research, or archives have?
Every estate is as individual as the art and the people who shaped it. There can be no universal instructions. But there are questions that help in finding one’s own way.
Anne Scherer and Die Kunstagentin
Born of personal responsibility
I come from a family in which making art and collecting it are part of life. When I took on responsibility for an artist’s estate and a collector’s estate myself, questions arose for which I found no easy answers — not even within the art market.
I hold a degree in business law and have worked in various roles in the art market since 2007. Today, this professional experience is joined by the personal and emotional perspective of someone responsible for an estate.
The name „Die Kunstagentin" has been with me since 2010. It began with an art management agency, which later gave rise to a gallery for contemporary art in Cologne. Today the name stands for a new chapter: an independent knowledge platform where I make sense of experience, surface connections, and keep thinking through questions on handling artist and collector estates.
The perspective
One work, different meanings
A work of art can be many things at once: a personal memory, part of a life’s work, a piece of art-historical evidence, or an object of the art market. Depending on who is looking at it, different questions come to the fore.
A gallery thinks about a work differently than a museum does. An artist’s estate makes different demands than a private collection. Market value and art-historical significance can coincide — but they don’t have to.
There is therefore no single, definitive perspective for handling an estate. Only in the interplay of different viewpoints does it become clear what is appropriate and possible for a given body of work.
Why these essays exist
The right questions for your own path
With my essays, I share what has helped me understand the responsibility for two estates, and find, step by step, a way of handling it.
The texts are written for people facing similar tasks. They define terms, show connections, and consider possibilities — without prescribing ready-made solutions. Because which questions matter and which answers hold up can only be decided individually, for each estate.
Die Kunstagentin offers knowledge and food for thought, not individual consulting. It aims to encourage a closer look, a weighing of options, and a deliberate shaping of one’s own path.
In dialogue
Knowledge stays in motion
The essays do not emerge in a closed room. They draw on academic research, institutional perspectives, developments in the art market, and the experience of other estate managers.
Exchange with people from museums, research, foundations, galleries, and the wider world of artist and collector estates keeps opening new perspectives. Not every question can be answered conclusively. That is exactly why it is worth thinking them through together.