Daria Rzhavtseva works at the intersection of art, tech, and business, advising galleries, fairs, and ArtTech founders on operational models and growth. Her perspective is shaped by being inside the day-to-day reality of how galleries and fairs actually run — and what breaks first when they scale.
Anastasiia Ageeva is a communications strategist and the founder of COM.ART — a communications agency working at the intersection of arts and technology. Her work focuses on translating artistic ideas into narratives that institutions, companies, and wider audiences can understand and act on. She believes that in a market this relational, communication itself becomes infrastructure.
Together they are exploring how technologies may change and improve the art industry. In this conversation for Weekly Minds, they look at why the art world is still running on inboxes and group chats in 2026, where collectors are quietly lost, and what shifts the moment galleries and fairs decide to stop holding everything together with personal hustle.
COM.ART works with galleries, artists, and art fairs. From everything you’ve seen across the industry, what surprises you most about how operationally manual the art world still is in 2026?
Anastasiia: Honestly, what stands out to me is how much of the art world’s day-to-day still depends on personal touch and individual memory — and how naturally that has been preserved, even as the industries around it modernised. The art world is, by nature, a relational space. It values intimacy, taste, and the human side of every conversation, and that culture has shaped the way galleries and fairs work for decades. What’s interesting in 2026 is that this beautiful tradition is starting to meet a new reality: collectors who move faster, teams that are leaner, and an attention economy that doesn’t quite forgive delay. So I wouldn’t call it surprising — I’d say it reminds me how thoughtful and careful this industry is, and how respectful we should be when introducing new tools into it. The opportunity now isn’t to replace what makes the art world special. It’s to give it room to keep doing the human work even better.
Galleries collect a huge amount of valuable data – previews sent, conversations, waitlists, sales – but most of it lives in inboxes and chats. What’s lost when this data isn’t captured, and what becomes possible the moment it is?
Daria:The real problem isn’t that galleries don’t have data—it’s that they don’t have time to analyze it. Artist updates, collector news, market trends, engagement metrics—it’s all there, but nobody is actually looking at it. And they shouldn’t have to manually. Technology already exists to automate this. But most galleries still send generic newsletters because that’s what they’ve always done. Generic doesn’t work anymore. The gallery database has hundreds of contacts with different interests and budgets, so one message gets lost on most of them.
Now imagine this: what if a gallery could automatically analyze collector behavior and send personalized messages to the entire database—not just the 10-15 main collectors? Each person gets contacted about pieces that match their interests and history. No huge team needed, just smart automation.
Sales increase because people get relevant messages instead of noise. Costs optimize because you’re not wasting time on manual analysis. And a small team can suddenly nurture relationships with hundreds of collectors instead of a handful. That’s not just efficiency. That’s a different business model.
AI is everywhere now. From what you’re seeing, where is it genuinely useful in art-world workflows today, and where is it still mostly noise?
Daria: AI isn’t about replacing humans in the art world—it can’t. Art is relationship-based and creative. Taste, relationships, real conversations—that human touch is essential. But AI is genuinely useful everywhere else. Use it to research collectors faster, identify patterns, suggest which collectors to contact about which pieces. Let it generate first drafts of social media content and newsletters with your tone of voice that your team then reviews. Have it analyze sales data, trends, organize information. It removes the grunt work that’s slowing everyone down. Think of AI as a coworker who never sleeps and doesn’t take days off—someone who handles all the repetitive tasks and research so your team can focus on what matters. That’s not avoiding technology. That’s using it intelligently so humans can focus on what only they can do—build real relationships, curate, scale.
The art market is one of the last industries where automation hasn’t really landed. Why do you think that is – is it culture, fear, lack of tools, or something else?
Anastasiia: I think it’s a combination of things, and none of them are unreasonable. The art market is built on trust, taste, and reputation, and those qualities take time to translate into systems. There’s also a real shortage of tools designed specifically for this industry — software made for retail or finance simply doesn’t fit how galleries and fairs think. And of course, there’s a healthy carefulness around technology: the worry that automation might dilute the relationship, or replace the intuition that has always guided the field. All of these feelings are understandable. The industry is naturally a little conservative, and that has protected a lot of what we love about it. But we’re entering a moment where galleries and fairs are gently reconsidering. Technology, used with care, doesn’t replace taste — it gives taste more space and time. The conversations I’m having now, even with very traditional galleries, are very different from the ones I was having three years ago. There’s a quiet openness emerging, and I find that genuinely encouraging.
When a gallery juggles dozens of artists and hundreds of collectors at once, where in the funnel – from a collector’s first interest to a closed sale – do you see the most deals quietly disappearing, and why?
Anastasiia: The art world rarely loses deals dramatically — it’s almost always something quieter. What I notice most often is that opportunities slip between the first conversation and the second. A collector shows real interest at a fair or a preview, and then life happens — for them and for the team — and the follow-up doesn’t quite land in time. Another beautiful but underused space is the waitlist: galleries build remarkable interest around an artist, and those collectors don’t always hear from the gallery again for the next show or the next edition. And finally there’s the long-time collector who simply hasn’t been in touch for a while — not because the relationship cooled, but because the team’s attention is naturally pulled in many directions. None of this is anyone’s fault. It’s the natural consequence of small teams doing extraordinary work. With even very gentle structure in place, much of this becomes recoverable, and the relationships have a chance to keep growing.
Collectors have changed a lot in the last five years: faster, more digital, less patient. What do galleries and fairs that have started building proper data and processes around this gain over the ones that haven’t?
Anastasiia: I would describe it as continuity. Today’s collectors move quickly, and they move across many channels — Instagram, previews, group chats, fairs — often in the same week. When a gallery has even light structure around its collector relationships, the team can respond in a way that feels personal and informed, even when the pace is fast. They remember what someone bought, what they were curious about, what they responded to. That kind of memory is what real long-term collector relationships are built on. It also gives smaller teams the ability to look after a much larger group of people with the same care that used to be reserved for a handful of names. So it isn’t really about becoming more “data-driven” — it’s about being able to honour the relational nature of this industry at a larger scale, and over a longer time. That, to me, is a quiet but meaningful shift.
For a gallery or fair team that wants to bring some order into their processes but doesn’t know where to start -what’s the first thing you’d tell them to look at?
Daria: First, admit that the way you do it now is exhausting. Not inefficient—exhausting. Here’s the hard truth: don’t waste time trying to build these automations yourself. You don’t have the capacity, and you know it. Instead, explore the companies already solving these problems. There are tools and services designed specifically for galleries and art fairs. Use them. Yes, there’s a cost, but I’d say a small investment.The opportunities you’re losing without a solution are infinitely larger. Any optimization looks complicated until the moment you see how much time and money you just saved. Then it looks obvious. The price of a software solution is nothing compared to the price of having your best people spend their week managing invoices back-and-forth and coordinating across a hundred chats.
Don’t be scared of technology—use it intelligently. The art world deserves what it’s losing right now: visibility, sales growth, actual work with art and artists. Pick one pain point—sponsor acquisition, collector research, content creation, sales analytics—and find a tool that solves it. You’ll be shocked at what one small change does.
What would you say to a gallery owner or fair director who tells you, “everything works manually and we’re fine” – what are they not seeing?
Anastasiia: I would say: that’s wonderful, and I completely understand. The art world has been built on personal effort and care, and there is something genuinely valuable in that. What I would gently invite them to consider is that the environment around them is shifting, and small structural improvements can actually protect the things they care about most — the relationships, the artists, the legacy of the gallery. It isn’t about replacing how things have always been done; it’s about giving the team a little more room to breathe, so they can spend more of their week with collectors and artists rather than with admin. Often the first conversation isn’t even about technology. It’s about asking: what would your team do with one extra day a week? Which relationships would they nurture more deeply? Which artists would get more attention? Once that question opens up, everything else tends to follow naturally.
If you walked into a typical gallery team’s week, what tasks eat up the most time – and which of those should never have been done by a human in the first place?
Daria: Galleries exist to sell art and promote artists, but time gets stolen not by the tasks themselves, but by broken processes: searching for information in numerous chats, manual payment chasing, scattered collector research, incomplete artist updates, manual inventory tracking, ad-hoc content creation, sales decisions based on gut feeling instead of data, and new staff onboarding from scratch. Almost all of these should never be done by humans — they’re pure operational friction. Instead of spending hours on manual processes, the team should have time for what actually drives growth: building real relationships, understanding what collectors want, and making strategic decisions about which artists fit where. The teams winning in the art market aren’t smarter—they’re just freed from busywork.
Art fairs have a very specific kind of operational pain — hundreds of galleries, press, collectors, logistics, all converging in a few days. What breaks first, and where are the worst bottlenecks behind the scenes?
Daria: For small or mid-size art fairs, everything breaks at sponsor acquisition. One person’s personal network is the sponsorship business—deals get lost, nothing gets tracked, follow-ups are reactive. After the fair ends, sponsors expect detailed reports for relationship management, which the team barely has time for. Then comes content chaos: the fair needs to create massive amounts of repetitive material showcasing galleries across social media, lots of content in the month before and during the fair. But the real killer underneath is zero analytics or personalization. Nobody knows which sponsors will renew, which collectors spent the most, or which galleries drove traffic. So you end up losing deals you didn’t even know existed, burning people out creating content that doesn’t drive the KPIs, and watching sponsors disappear because nobody followed up. The whole operation is held together by small team hustle instead of actual systems.
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