This Startup is Changing How We Collect Art: Behind the Seen with Avant Arte CEO Mazdak Sanii

There are startups that want to disrupt the art world. And then there's Avant Arte, a platform so deeply embedded in art culture that its CEO visibly winces at the word "disrupt."

I sat down with Mazdak Sanii, CEO of Avant Arte, expecting to poke holes and find the fatal flaw. What I found instead was something rarer: a company that actually understands what it's building, why it's building it, and who it's building it for.

The Avant Arte New Generation Report is out now. This year’s findings show that younger collectors are becoming an increasingly active economic and philanthropic force, spending meaningfully on artworks, visiting museums frequently, and demonstrating a growing appetite to financially support institutions.

From French Horn to Fine Art

Mazdak isn't a career art world insider. He trained intensively as a French horn player before pivoting, hard, into literary theory, Derrida, and eventually the founding team of Boiler Room, the live music platform that turned intimate gigs into global streaming events. His co-founders Curtis and Christian came from a town with no galleries, no museums, no concert halls. They discovered culture through the internet. That origin story is not incidental, it's Avant Arte's entire thesis.

Opening Things Up Without Shallowing Them Out

Eight years and 750 projects later, Avant Arts has worked with 250 artists, from Anish Kapoor's first-ever silkscreen print to Tschabalala Self’s first public sculpture in London, from Grayson Perry to Shirin Neshat. Their partnerships span LACMA, the Contemporary Art Society, and institutions that have spent centuries working on public access. And their audience? Overwhelmingly under 40, spread across the globe, often making their very first meaningful art purchase.

That last stat is the one that stopped me. On the Ed Ruscha edition done in partnership with LACMA, 40% of buyers had never collected art before. Nearly a thousand people were first-timers that were brought into the art market through a platform that makes it feel like a discovery rather than a transaction.

The Print Studio That Defies the Word "Print"

Walk through Avant Arte's print studio (which I did, for a full hour, with head printmaker Tom, you can watch that here) and you'll quickly understand why they bristle at comparisons to a Xerox machine. The editions produced here involve layers of ink so deep and deliberate that even a certificate of authenticity might struggle to convince future generations they're looking at a print. The studio, born from a merger with Tom's operation, Make-Ready, is obsessive about quality at scale. When you’re dealing with 1,900 Ed Ruscha prints, every single one has to be absolutely spot on.

A Gateway Drug for Culture

I told Mazdak that what he's building feels like a gateway drug, to collecting, to patronage, to a deeper relationship with the institutions that hold our cultural memory. He didn't flinch. The goal, explicitly, is to take someone from their first $1,000 edition purchase all the way to becoming the next generation of museum patrons. Jessica Morgan, director of the Deer Art Foundation, personally emailed Avant Arte's George Condo collectors to invite them to a preview. That's a revolutionary pipeline, not a marketing gimmick.

What Avant Arte Is Not

It's not a gallery. It's not trying to represent artists. It doesn't call its sales "drops" (they're "releases," and yes, the distinction matters). It's not here to disrupt. It's here to be additive - to bring new people in without shallowing the conversation out, to work alongside galleries rather than against them, to use technology as a vehicle for culture rather than a replacement for it.

Avant Arte's logo is Duchamp's urinal. There are Easter eggs across the site for the deeply initiated. But the front door is wide open.

That's the whole point.