Artist Pension Trust’s London Closure Triggers Artist Backlash
The London branch of the Artist Pension Trust is shutting down, and the artists who joined it are now challenging the structure that once promised to turn artworks into a kind of long-term retirement pool. More than 40 participating artists say APT London Inc may have been operating as an unregulated investment scheme, and they are demanding the return of their works as well as compensation for financial losses.
According to the Financial Times, three artists said they had never received any money from APT. That detail has sharpened the dispute around a model that was originally presented as a mutual assurance program for contemporary artists: contributors would place works into the trust, which would then sell them over a 20-year period and distribute proceeds. Even in early coverage of the project, skepticism was built into the story. Private dealer Clarissa Dalrymple described the concept as speculative and said there was no way to know whether it would work.
The London branch announced plans to close in May and sent artists a termination agreement offering to return 70 percent of the works they had contributed. APT would keep the remaining 30 percent to cover outstanding expenses. For artist Céline Condorelli, that arrangement crossed a line. She called it “a betrayal on an epic scale.”
The UK Financial Conduct Authority has not regulated the company, which is run from outside the UK. Guillermo Malm Green, the lawyer administering the closure, said APT is now owned by “a large number of distributed shareholders,” excluding co-founder and tech entrepreneur Moti Shniberg.
The dispute lands at a moment when artists are increasingly attentive to the financial structures surrounding their work, not just the market value of the work itself. It also raises a broader question that has shadowed APT for years: what happens when a system built on trust begins to look, to its participants, like a liability?
The same roundup also noted the death of Richard H. Glanton, the former head of the Barnes Foundation, who died at 79. Glanton is remembered for taking 80 French artworks on tour in the 1990s to help fund a renovation, and for a combative leadership style that made him a consequential figure in Philadelphia museum history.
