Joshua Roth, at Paramount Studios, leads United Talent Agency’s fine arts division, 

which was created in February. Credit J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — The office of Joshua Roth, a lawyer-turned-agent at the United Talent Agency headquarters here, has all the trappings of a Hollywood player: the expensive swivel chair, the big flat-screen TV. It also boasts the outward signs of an art dealer. Issues of Artforum and Art in America are fanned out on his desk, alongside entertainment industry publications. On the wall hangs an ’80s-pink portrait by the Los Angeles artist Alex Israel. Works by the painter Jonas Wood and the ceramist Shio Kusaka line the space. And Mr. Roth’s assistant is busy planning his trips to scout talent — not just at Cannes and Sundance, but at Art Basel Hong Kong and the Frieze Art Fair in New York.

“I’m interested in artists who are re-envisioning the way to make art and re-envisioning how people experience it,” he said. “And I think our agency can be really helpful in that way. We want to help find opportunities for artists outside of the gallery.”

What exactly those opportunities are has been hard to pin down.

“Maurizio Cattelan: The Movie,” a documentary by Maura Axelrod, which is being handled by United Talent. 

Credit Lucian Read

United Talent hired Mr. Roth, a legal adviser to local art stars like Sterling Ruby and the son of Steven F. Roth, a founder of the rival Creative Artists Agency, to lead its new fine arts division and mine a new market. The announcement in February caused a stir in Hollywood and the art world, amid fears the agency would poach talent from galleries and dealers.

Seven months later, United Talent may allay some concerns with its first project: “Maurizio Cattelan: The Movie,” a documentary about that Italian artist by the filmmaker Maura Axelrod.

Mr. Cattelan, known for often surreal, multimedia work — at his retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2011, he suspended all his pieces from the rotunda — is not part of the deal, Ms. Axelrod said. He is represented by prestigious gallerists, including Marian Goodman in New York and Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris. But the documentary will benefit from the agency’s expertise in film distribution and promotion, Ms. Axelrod said. The company connected her with backers to finance her final edit and will act as a sales agent at festivals. “For me, this was an opportunity for my work about Maurizio to reach a wider audience,” she said.

For Mr. Roth, the documentary is the start of what he hopes will be a fruitful cross-pollination. The agency does not intend to sell paintings or sculpture; rather, it wants to broker deals like the one that resulted in a nine-minute Kanye West-Steve McQueen video screened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in July. Mr. West is a client of United Talent; Mr. McQueen, the video-artist-turned-filmmaker, is not, but Mr. Roth said he pitched the project to Michael Govan, the director of the museum.

Joshua Roth of United Talent Agency. Credit J. 

Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Other deals are percolating. At Frieze London in October, the Haas Brothers, Los Angeles-based twins who are design collaborators, will have an exhibition at the Rosewood Hotel arranged by Mr. Roth, who represents both the artists and the hotel for this project.

In the last few months, he has expanded his staff, adding another lawyer-turned-art-adviser, Lesley Silverman. A Harvard Business School student, Anna Raginskaya, helped draft a business strategy. If the results are slim and slow, Mr. Roth is still careful about ruffling feathers. “Sometimes people in the art world, without having all the info, will put a negative slant on things,” he said.

As Mr. Cattelan put it, when asked about the intersection of art and entertainment: “Like a fish, maybe the whole thing will start to smell bad after a few days.” But Mr. Roth has the support of the agency’s chief executive Jeremy Zimmer and chairman Jim Berkus, both avid art collectors.

United Talent is hardly the first agency to pursue visual artists. At Creative Artists Agency, Thao Nguyen has long specialized in art and design and the company’s clients include the architect Rem Koolhaas, with whom it is developing an update of the sci-fi classic “Metropolis.” William Morris Endeavor counts the street artist Shepard Fairey, the installation artist Tom Sachs and the fashion favorite Takashi Murakami among its clientele, all with an eye to TV or film work.

The artist Daniel Arsham, who signed with Creative Artists. Credit James Law

Daniel Arsham, a New York artist represented by Galerie Perrotin, signed with Creative Artists recently, in the hopes of making movies. “I can make paintings by myself, but filmmaking is a very different craft that requires a lot of different people that do things that I have no background in,” he said of his decision to enlist Hollywood help. Ms. Nguyen has been sending him scripts while he works on his nine-part film series, “Future Relic.” (One part had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this year.)

Agencies may be banking on more artists becoming multimedia phenoms, like Mr. Arsham, Julian Schnabel and Mr. McQueen. But when it comes to art, Larry Auerbach, a former William Morris agent and now an associate dean at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, said it remains to be seen “how lucrative this area could be.” Mostly, the agencies are trying to diversify. “They’re all looking for the next big business,” Mr. Auerbach said, pointing to Creative Artists and William Morris’s involvement in sports, and United Talent’s recent acquisition of a music booking company. United Talent, privately held and the smallest of the three agencies, recently stunned the industry by luring away many top comedy agents from Creative Artists (a move that agency is fighting in court). Last month, United Talent also received an influx of funds from a new investor, Jeffrey Ubben, a hedge fund operator, for expansion.

Marian Goodman, whose Manhattan gallery represents Mr. McQueen as well as Mr. Cattelan, was sanguine about the competition that agencies pose. “We work with a half-dozen artists who make films and we sell the films,” she said. “This is not our world, really, but I’m not against it,” she said of artists who aim for the cineplex. “If they do a good job for him, I’ll be happy for him,” she added of United Talent’s involvement with the Cattelan documentary.

For Mr. Roth, art has been a family business. His father collects contemporary art; his grandparents, the patrons Florence and Bernard B. Roth, donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and he bought his first piece, by Raymond Pettibon, when just out of college.

“It is a natural progression,” said Ms. Axelrod, who jumped into filmmaking from investigative journalism. “If you’re willing to participate in this system where art is being bought and sold as an asset class, then you can’t object to art being part of the entertainment class next.” She added, “You can look at it as the ultimate commercialization of art, or you can say, this is a way for artists to get more of a foothold in popular culture.”