The Art of Renting

by Daniel Grant

Over the years homeowners have purchased Jenny Laden's paintings, and as she said, "My art looks like something you'd see in someone's home." That may be good enough for the film industry. Several of the Brooklyn, New York, artist's figurative pictures of women have been used as set décor by small-scale filmmakers who have rented the paintings for the few days it took to design a set and film a scene. Her work does more than just fill the space. It's been exhibited in galleries in the United States and Europe. The big screen is now one more place where people can see it.

"It's exposure," Laden said, "and exposure leads to a wider audience of people who might like what you do." She has no illusions that her backdrops, even if the films were to have international distribution, will become a big break in her career. Few movie viewers pay attention to what's on the set, and the credits won't list her work. (Academy Awards go to set designers, not to prop makers.)

The claim that a particular painting appeared in a movie isn't likely to raise the value of the piece, "although it will make an interesting story when I talk with collectors. It always helps when you have something to say about your work." It's also money in her pocket ($300 per painting), plus the art is returned to her for potential sale or to rent again.

Sales of art can grab the headlines, but rentals have become a major growth area in the art market, catering to an audience of corporations, film and television producers, real-estate agents, and homeowners. Each in this group has its own reasons for wanting to rent rather than to buy. For instance, corporations that may be facing economic uncertainty, takeovers, mergers, and possible relocations want art for office decoration but don't want to invest in a collection that may need to be put into storage or sold. Renting is less expensive, less permanent, and tax-deductible.

"They're not married to the art," said Barbara Koz Paley, chief executive officer of Manhattan-based Art Assets, which has leased artworks ("some valued in the six figures") to businesses since 1993. The objects rented by Art Assets come from a variety of sources, such as galleries, museums, and private collectors, but increasingly from individual artists. "It's just so much easier to deal directly with artists than with their dealers," she noted, "and in the age of the Internet, it's just so much easier to get to artists."

Many of the almost 50 clients of Art Assets are office building owners and managers who are using art as a tool to sell their properties, upgrade their buildings, and set a "cultural tone." The rental of artwork is 3% of the object's value over a negotiated period of time. The cost to the corporate client, she noted, is usually passed along to tenants. In addition, "by renting, they pay a fraction of the cost of buying, and there are distinct tax benefits."

Among the artists who have leased their work through Art Assets is Jill London of New York City, whose art involves gold leaf on paper and other surfaces. She said she's earned $3600 to $3800 for the rental of 16 pieces on two separate occasions, each lasting one month. The income was welcome, as was just getting some artwork out of her studio.

"I live in the Lower East Side in a small, cramped apartment-studio, and it's great for me when I can move work out," London said. The opportunity for having her work seen was no less valuable. "People ask if my work is being shown anywhere, and I tell them, 'Yes, you can see my work over there in that building.'"

Real-estate agents seek artwork when staging houses and apartments to give a property a more lived-in look that may entice buyers. Shawn McNulty, a painter in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who has sold his artwork at gallery exhibitions and through his Web site, entered the art rental business in 2007 when "a real-estate agent working with a stager asked me to lease some paintings" for some properties. Six of his large-scale (3' x 4') abstract paintings were used in a downtown Minneapolis loft, and another five medium-size (2' x 2') works were placed in a house in St. Paul. Both properties sold (maybe the art helped). He earned $780 and learned a new way to earn money as an artist.

"I offer rentals now on my Web site," McNulty said. "I'm pretty prolific, and I'd be happy if I can move some older work out of the studio this way, at least temporarily."

More and more artists have taken the same direction as McNulty, soliciting rental business and developing art rental agreements that cover the cost (his prices range from 7% to 10% of the retail value for a three-month rental), insurance (renter is liable for lost, stolen, or damaged artwork), transportation (renter pays), the manner of payment (credit card usually, since the rental agreement automatically is renewed at the same terms unless the item is returned), and the process by which a leasing agreement turns into a purchase ("half of the rental money goes toward the purchase price," he said).

In large measure artists have left the particulars of art rental agreements up to organizations to which they belong. For instance, Santa Monica Art Studios in California and the Peoria Art Guild in Illinois promote and arrange leases. A number of art galleries—the Monsoon Galleries in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Hang Art in San Francisco, and Larsen Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona—promote art leasing plans. Others rent pieces more informally and only occasionally for the artists they represent. Art galleries tend to structure their rentals as lease-to-purchase agreements. Companies such as Art Assets tend to offer straight leasing agreements, "although sales take place maybe ten or twelve percent of the time," Paley said.

Sales haven't taken place for Jill London, who stated that building lobbies "aren't selling spaces, and people who look at art there don't think of it as something to buy." On the other hand, the work of Serena Bocchino, a painter in Hoboken, New Jersey, has sold. Her artworks, rented through Art Assets for the Manhattan headquarters of tax accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, so favorably impressed the company that it purchased 20 of her paintings for its corporate collection. Bocchino had earned a leasing fee of over $4000. "I got paid for exhibiting my paintings, and I got paid for selling my paintings," she said. "All in all, it was a very good experience for me."

Additionally, various museums around the country permit select private and corporate backers to rent pieces for varying lengths of time. The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, for instance, "will install an exhibition of Museum-owned and artist-loaned artwork in Corporate Member offices for the duration of the membership," according to its Web site. A number of other institutions (Coos Art Museum in Oregon, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Seattle Art Museum, among them) have volunteer-run sales and rental galleries. The artworks for sale or rent are not part of the museum collections.

Sometimes homeowners rent artwork on a lease-to-own arrangement that allows them to pay over time while making sure they really like the art; if, after a month or six months or a year, they decide the art isn't right for them, they may return it.

Another market for art leasing is the entertainment industry, which continually needs props (preferably that don't require storage). The rental of objects frequently fits into a budget better than purchases. Antiques and craft items also are used on film sets, in magazine advertising shoots, and as displays in store windows, but artwork does tend to be the largest category in terms of dollar value. Incidentally, Bijan Nassi, owner of Bijan Royal, an antiques shop in New York City, claimed that he rents between 300 and 400 objects per month for use as props.

Jenny Laden herself did not look for rental business from movie studios but was part of a Brooklyn-based company, Art for Film, which promotes the work of about two dozen painters and sculptors to the film industry in New York City and elsewhere. Jessica Heyman, the owner of Art for Film, noted that her pricing is flexible, because "some studios have bigger budgets than others, and you have to work within their budgets rather than have a set price." A rental payment is split evenly between the company and the individual artist.

Frequently, a film studio set decorator doesn't take the physical painting but a digital image of it, which can be printed out at a size that better fits the actual set. For example, one of Laden's watercolor paintings, a 75" x 40" work titled Lady, "needed to be smaller than it was," she said. It was reduced through a computer printer. At the end of the shoot the digital print was returned to her, "which actually gave me something else I could sell."

In effect, this rental process allows a studio a one-time right to license the image for a relatively brief period of time. The benefit to the studio of working directly with artists or through a company like Art for Film is that it gains clearance, or permission, to use the image. Failure to acquire those rights when copyrighted artworks are purposefully or inadvertently included in scenes has resulted in lawsuits and judgments against studios.

Film and television studios don't usually have large budgets for set props. Heyman noted that some artworks have been rented but not used on a set, simply because the set designer wants to have a variety of choices. So this type of income is supplemental rather than primary for most artists. Set designers sometimes find artwork on line, but they are more apt to use local artists or local galleries, simply because they don't tend to travel hundreds of miles for a two-day $300 rental. As a result, artists in southern California, New York City, and Vancouver, Canada—the three largest areas of filmmaking in North America—tend to benefit the most.

Sculptor Bruce Gray of Los Angeles and painter Susan Manders of Sherman Oaks, California, had their first art rentals to film studios through galleries, but they both moved to represent themselves in rentals, doubling the amount of money they earned. "I started to notice that there was a lot of art in TV shows and movies and thought, 'That could be mine,'" Gray said.

Still, for them, the money doesn't add up to a livelihood. It's thousands rather than tens of thousands of dollars per year. Art rentals don't "happen all that often, maybe a few times a year," said Gray, whose sculptures have been in the backgrounds of three Austin Powers movies, in Meet the Fockers, The Truth about Cats and Dogs, and Sleeping with the Enemy, as well as in over 100 commercials (Honda and Sprint, among them) and television shows (including CSI and Six Feet Under). He has advertised in industry publications and sent postcards to set designers about his work, but "most of my art rentals have come about through word of mouth."

There are benefits and drawbacks to renting works of art. Gray had one sculpture stolen off a movie set ("I got paid for it, though maybe not what it was worth"). Another was scratched ("They actually rented it a second time in order to repaint it; turned out good as new"). A third sculpture was repainted in different colors ("a crappy job") to match the colors on the set. "If you can't bear to see something happen to your work," he said, "you shouldn't rent it out."

Manders noted that she has been lucky in terms of no thefts and no damage and even luckier that arrangements that started out as rentals turned into purchases. "Doing business with studios has other benefits," she stated. She said she has been commissioned each year since 2005 to create an edition of prints that are included in the gift bags for presenters at television's Emmy awards. "It brings my work to well-known celebrities, and that leads to other sales, because a number of the presenters became buyers."

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