Art handlers / art movers / art packers are a special kind of grey eminence: everybody sees them but barely anyone pays much attention, although this is them who ACTUALLY DO THE JOB.
They are the very few guys allowed to touch, pack, transport and install art works. Even though most of them have an academic or artistic background, registrars and conservators sadly tend to see them as blue collar workers and treat in a patronizing manner.
Please kindly note that while dressed in sweatshirts with company logos, work trousers and safety steel-toe boots absolutely nobody looks like an intellectual, forget a sexy one :)
Art handlers can be divided into two cathegories:
1. Old troupers, who have been doing this for the living for the past 25 years and had in their hands more artworks than any museum employee. Besides, they can park a 18t truck with a jumbo trailer backwards, have been everywhere, have seen everything. Nothing and nobody can surprise or impress them – they regularely through the Tuileries, hang paintings in the president's cabinett and deliver art works to celebrities' villas, as well as to medieval castles towering on steep rocks. That is why it is better NOT to tell them how they should do their job, especially, if you're a beginning registrar and have never moved an art work with your own hands but just read at the university a lot about how it (theoretically) should be done. Trust these guys - they know what and why they're doing.
2. Relatively young, often upcoming artists, who know how to handle art from their own artistic practice and do the art packer's job for some extra income. As they rarely posses a license to drive a > 3,5t truck, their activity is mostly limited to one city and their experience, for obvious reasons, lesser than of old bulls. On the other hand, coming from the art world, they have a good overview over values of transported art works, as well as the awareness of the millieu-conditioned importance of customers and artists, which makes them possibly to more a appealing company for the served clients.
A good art mover is worth his weight in gold and luckily there are clients who appreciate their work: we repeatedly receive requests from artists or museum couriers to send a particular driver to handle their work or loan.
PS.1. If you happened to have seen some art-handling scenes, in the movies like "The Best Offer" or in the latest season of "Ray Donovan", just please forget them. Art handlers do wear white gloves but not a suit or elegant shoes (for safety reasons), auction lots are transported safely and according to buyers' wishes, and a fine art truck cannot be stolen and hidden just so, as it is usually equipped with a satellite tracking system.
PS.2. "Mona Lisa" is so small and rarely moved that propably Louvre conservators can handle her on their own, so an art mover who actually had the painting in his hands may consider himself lucky and honored :)
