Can Art Influence the Closing of a Deal?

The world’s most prestigious institutions have spent years building some of the most valuable art collections in existence. So, can the presence of art influence a deal? The more interesting question is how.

There is a moment in every business encounter when the client is welcomed into a room, offered a coffee, and asked to wait a minute. In that minute, their eyes move. What they land on, whether they know it or not, is already doing work on them.

Monte dei Paschi di Siena began collecting art in 1472, making it arguably the first corporate collection in history. The origins of today’s JPMorgan Chase Art Collection date back to the mid twentieth century, when David Rockefeller built out Chase Manhattan’s holdings, transforming corporate collecting into a strategic tool for brand identity, employee engagement, and cultural patronage. Today Deutsche Bank holds more than 57,000 works and UBS around 35,000. The logic travels well beyond finance, with law firms and other industries employing art as a means of decorating buildings, expressing civic prestige, and reinforcing identity and legitimacy.

The case for art as a negotiating instrument

This matters most for institutions that sell something intangible. Trust, discretion, judgement. A law firm cannot let a client inspect its counsel the way they might inspect a car, and neither can a private bank let them inspect its judgement in advance. So the environment adds to the proof. What is really being deployed here is what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic capital: prestige that only exists once someone else recognises it as legitimate. A collection cannot buy trust directly, but it can signal the kind of institution that trust tends to attach itself to. It becomes a credential.

The official language these institutions use for their collections tends to circle three words: inspiration, dialogue, legacy. Deutsche Bank’s own framing is that art “questions, inspires people, opens up new perspectives.” Britta Faerber, the bank’s deputy global head of art, has spoken of collecting as something that pays “emotional dividends” and carries a trace of an institution’s own point of view.

There is also a quieter, more tactical function. Art gives people something to talk about that is not the deal, which lowers resistance. A shared reaction to a piece, even a mild disagreement over it, builds a small patch of common ground before the harder conversation starts.

Why the choice of art is never neutral

Where the psychology gets interesting is in the specifics, because different art has a different impact depending on where it hangs.

Colour research consistently finds that blue environments read as trustworthy and calm, which is presumably why so many financial institutions and law firms gravitate toward cool, restrained palettes in their public facing spaces. Warmer tones, reds and oranges in particular, are associated with urgency and stimulation, useful on a trading floor where a fast decision is the point, entirely wrong in a room where you want a client to feel unhurried and secure.

Scale and texture matter as much as colour. A vast abstract canvas in a lobby communicates confidence and ambition, the institutional equivalent of a raised voice used well. A smaller, quieter, more intimate work in a private meeting room does the opposite job: it signals that this space, unlike the lobby, is personal. Curating for these environments, then, is really curating for a sequence of feelings: awe at the entrance, ease in the boardroom, discretion in the room where the actual number gets discussed.

There is a risk in getting this wrong that most institutions underestimate. Art chosen purely to signal wealth, an obvious blue chip name with no relationship to the room it sits in, tends to produce the opposite of trust. It reads as a purchase rather than a point of view, and clients, particularly the ones sophisticated enough to be worth closing a deal with, notice the discrepancy.

Art has always been used to close distance between people. Prestigious institutions simply understood that closing distance is most of what closing a deal actually is.

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