The Wall Street Journal does a cute profile of Los Angeles art lawyer and member of one of the city’s influential families, Joshua Roth, who owns all the right names in Contemporary art: Joe Bradley, David Ostrowski and Raymond Pettibon:
In addition to teaming up with his firm’s litigators to handle high-stakes cases—like a recent Salvador Dalí fraud lawsuit—Roth advises artists such as Mark Grotjahn and Sterling Ruby; galleries, including Regen Projects, Andrea Rosen and Venus Over Manhattan; and wealthy collectors. In the course of a typical day, he tackles contracts and purchase agreements at the office before dashing around the city to meet with clients about everything from contemporary art auctions in Hong Kong to one artist’s potential collaboration with Beats by Dre. At home, he and his wife, Sonya, a deputy attorney general for the State of California, host dinner parties with artist friends whose work lines their walls.
Art law is a specialty Roth was primed to take on. The son of Steven Roth, a cofounder of the talent agency CAA, and the grandson of major Los Angeles philanthropist Bernard Roth, Josh was immersed in the world of museums and galleries from a young age.[…]
As the recently appointed chair of the inaugural Director’s Council at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Roth has joined forces with the new director, Philippe Vergne—formerly director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York—to cultivate the city’s next generation of art philanthropists
