Agent Provocateur: Michele Caniato

Who knew that designers, like Hollywood starlets and NFL players, required agents? Back in 2001, someone did. “You have CAA and IMG representing talent in photography, acting and athletics,” says Michele Caniato, the New York–based agent who has brought a measure of professionalism to the world of creative endeavors. “There was a need to represent people in design.”

The boyishly enthusiastic 39-year-old Caniato counts Philippe Starck, Piero Lissoni and Marcel Wanders among the clients of his agency, Culture and Commerce. Before Caniato, corporations interested in working with designers had to find them on their own. This, as Murray Moss says, often led to their “coming up with names that are already famous.” It was the era of the feedback loop: If you were established, you would become more so; if you weren’t, you were out of luck. Caniato changed all that.

The first blind date Caniato set up, in 2001, was between Target and Starck. The result was a marriage of utility with high design in an innovative line of 50 items like the combination baby monitor/necklace and the X-shaped magazine rack. That deal solidified the idea that design could be accessible and mainstream. Caniato also represents up-and-comers like Dror Benshetrit, the Israeli-born, New York–based designer who this year is breaking into architecture and whose inventive creations—such as the Pick Chair, which unfolds to hang flat on a wall—have some calling him the industry’s next boy wonder.

Caniato’s biggest successes may be yet to come. He has lately brought together Starck and Sam Nazarian’s sbe Hotel Group for Some Little Secrets, a novel hospitality concept for the West Coast that puts a Moss retail space in each property. The first one opens this year in Beverly Hills. “The goal is to make their lives easy,” Caniato says of his clients. “That way they can just focus on designing. I call myself a coach.”

"Agent Provocateur: Michele Caniato" originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2008 Table of Contents.