Book: Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2010 by Grand Central Publishing (here). 304 pages, with 22 reproductions of artworks. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: Even though I knew Steve Martin's new novel had nothing to do with photography in particular, I couldn't help picking it up to see how he would take on collecting and the larger world of contemporary art. In general, my expectations and standards for art world fiction are exceedingly low; I've breezed my way through plenty of marginal stories of heists, forgeries, and intrigues over the years, happy to consume and discard them as the disposable entertainment that they are. The difference here is that Martin is himself an art collector, and so has almost certainly lived variations on many of the vignettes that pepper his story. As a result, when he opens up his biting wit, he is able to aim it with exacting precision, slicing the soft underbelly of auction houses, galleries, and fellow collectors with sparkling, almost gleeful flair.

The skeleton of the story is perfectly logical and predictable: a young woman (Lacey Yeager) starts as a junior cataloguer at Sotheby's, works her way up into the American Paintings department, leaves to become a director at an uptown gallery, and eventually opens her own gallery in Chelsea. Martin then takes this simple framework and embellishes it with a combination of insightful insider commentary (museum visits, individual painting explications, market analysis, and smart collector-driven thoughts) and a smorgasbord of art world scheming (bid rigging, dealer arbitrage, back room deals with museums, FBI investigations, various flavors of deception, and a pervasive streak of ambitious sexuality), hanging it on a chronological timeline that includes both the exuberant booms and the punishing busts of the past decade. It's all held together by the singular personality of his heroine, whose appetite for success is both insatiable and often reckless. Her driving aspirations lead her down plenty of opportunistic alleys, and while her triumphs cover her failures in the short term, in the end, she makes some poor choices that ultimately leave her in disgrace.

I found the ending of the book to be surprisingly depressing. This is particularly odd, since this novel is bursting with so many snappy one-liner comebacks and salty dialogue snippets that you'd expect to come away with a wry smile and a hearty chuckle (his disemboweling of a pair of clueless collectors and their Joseph Beuys felt suit is joyfully withering). And not that Lacey didn't deserve her eventual comeuppance; she did, that's clear. But when you close the cover on this story, it leaves you with a sad, deflated feel, as if all the machinations came to nothing, as if the whole art world was just a sham. As a collector who still finds moments of amazement every time I make a gallery tour, I found this conclusion to be overly jaded and pessimistic. Sure, the art market has its ridiculousness and its human imperfections, but I still believe that the art itself turns all of that nonsense into noise.

That said, this is a light and diverting satire, with plenty of juicy descriptive tidbits and moments of blinding repartee. Enjoy it for its sharp sarcastic humor, and watch with pleasure as Martin shrewdly cuts the workings of the art market to shreds.

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), Washington Post (here), Huffington Post (here), Salon (here)

Book: Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2008 by W.W. Norton & Company. 274 pages. Divided into 7 chapters (roughly 30 pages each): The Auction, The Crit, The Fair, The Prize, The Magazine, The Studio Visit, and The Biennale.

Comments/Context: Sarah Thornton's chronicle of the booming art world of a year or two ago might just as well be an anthropological study of an isolated tribe of the Amazon rain forest or some other far off locale. It is a piece of ethnographic writing, where the social and cultural behaviors of a group of people are described in depth, using thorough and careful "participant observation" (fly on the wall reporting) as the primary research method. This is not to say that this book is academic and boring; just the opposite in fact - it is well paced, gossipy at times, and generally highly entertaining. It is not, however, much about the art itself, but an in-depth study of the subcultures and social signals that make up the ecosystem that surrounds it.

As collectors ourselves, tangentially related to those described in these pages, the sections devoted to the study of auctions, art fairs, and the biennale didn't offer us many new insights, as we have participated in these worlds first hand. That said, the auction section neatly describes the theatrical spectacle of an evening Contemporary Art sale at Christie's, the fair section genuinely brings forth the wearying machinations of dealers, advisers and collectors at Art Basel, and the biennale section captures the idiosyncrasies of the national pavilions and the high end socializing.

I found more unexpected ideas and discoveries in the other sections. In The Crit, I was intrigued by the exhausting and mystifying full day critical review process that artists endure at CalArts, an amorphous, rambling and often painful discussion of an artist's current output. In The Prize, the backstage workings of the selection committee for the Turner Prize turned out to be less interesting than the four nominees themselves and how they were handling the pressure and publicity. And given our own writing about photography on this site, I was particularly interested by the section on Artforum (The Magazine) and the perilous balancing act that goes on between writers/critics, editors and advertisers each month to get the magazine out and the care with which the magazine's viewpoint is defended.

My favorite section in the book was was The Studio Visit, a sprawling review of Takashi Murakami's multi-national production empire, on the eve of his now famous MOCA show which included the Louis Vuitton shop as part of the exhibit. While we have been on intimate studio visits before, the scale here is broad and monumental. While there are plenty of large personalities in this section as well (including Murakami himself), there is more about the art and its making in this chapter than anywhere else in the book. The artist's process and management of his team of people are unusual and memorable.

Collector's POV: Overall, this narrative is very well crafted and seems to have been thoroughly researched, given the huge list of interviewees in the back. It is very people-centric and often dives into the subtle gestures and remarks that epitomize the inner workings of a small social group. Think of it as quick and lively read, with plenty of tidbits to engage even the most experienced and jaded collectors.

The author's website can be found here.

Book: Don Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark

JTF (just the facts): Subtitled The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art. Published in 2008 by Palgrave Macmillan. 268 pages, with 18 color images in a center section. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: I recently decided to go back and read some of the "general interest" books written about the contemporary art market during its frothy height a year or so ago, prior to current the economic crisis. I was curious to see whether they had become dated almost immediately and how relevant they still were. These books are not about photography per se (in this particular case, photography is largely ignored) but given photography's increasing importance in the world of contemporary art, there are broad insights from these books that can be applied to the smaller niche of photography.

This book comes from the Freakonomics and Tipping Point school of recent nonfiction, where an economist peers into a small, self contained ecosystem and applies rational economic thought to the activity going on, often producing entertaining, cocktail party ready insights. In this book, Don Thompson takes aim at the mystifying machinations of the art world. Given a business bent (he teaches in the MBA program at York University in Toronto), Thompson resonates with a skeptical marketing driven explanation for the behavior of the art world, and highlights the importance of branding and hierarchy for all the various interconnected players.

In the diagram below, I have tried to synthesise the insights of this book down into a quick, visual form that can be more easily discussed (this picture is of my own design and not part of the book in any way).

The argument being put forth is as follows. Artists, whether they like it or not, are sorted into a powerful hierarchy by the collective forces of the art world, and their careers are based on their trajectory up (and down) this ladder. The vast majority of artists (95%+) never make it out of the Invisible category. Of the ones that jump up into the Emerging category, it takes years of solid output and savvy marketing to graduate to the Established level, and again, most never make it and fall back down to Invisible over time. Moving up the ladder further to Important or Master takes a lifetime of work and successful branding.

In general, collectors are portrayed as insecure wealthy people who are looking for signals of quality from the other players in the contemporary market (context); they can't decide for themselves what is good, so they use "brand" as a proxy for quality, and follow the herd. Therefore, an artist's brand (rather than the work itself) becomes the driving force in the market (Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons as prime examples of this hype and celebrity driven approach).

Thompson goes on to place all of the other art market players (galleries/dealers, auction houses, museums, collectors, etc.) in this same branded hierarchy, all contributing to and influencing where an artist sits at any given time. Some explanation of the roles:

• Larry Gagosian is put forth as the ultimate "branded" dealer. His brand is so strong that it raises the prices of his artists meaningfully, by effective replacing the artist's brand with his own. Collectors (and museums) see his stamp of approval and feel confident they are getting the highest quality. All dealers and galleries array themselves against the above artist hierarchy, some focusing only on the recognized masters, some grooming established artists, others searching out and exposing emerging artists to the outside world. All are trying to create their own brands that define their value in the food chain, to help make collectors feel more comfortable. Art fairs are the ultimate meat (and money) market, where the brands of the galleries collide.
• Sotheby's and Christie's are seen as "branded" auction houses, where purchases at the high profile evening sales bring cache. The entire spectacle of the auction is designed to raise prices, but collectors use the events as ways to impress each other and draw on the brands of the houses (I bought this at Sotheby's or Christie's; it is therefore good). Again, a house like Phillips De Pury has placed itself in a different place on the hierarchy by selling the work of many more emerging artists.
• Even big time collectors become "branded", thereby increasing their power in the market. Charles Saatchi, Steve Cohen, and Eli Broad are just three names (among many, many others) that drive the market. If a gallery can "place" a work in one of these collections, it raises the value of the artist's brand. These collectors becomes arbiters of taste for other collectors (and museums) and get first choice ("access") to new output; their selections are followed and repeated, driving prices up. Collectors too align themselves in different places in the hierarchy; many collectors who once chased the trophy lots (perhaps in search of recognition, fame or a quick speculative flip) move on to search for the best emerging work. If they have a good "eye", their brand value as collectors increases.
• Museum brands are also vitally important to the underlying artist brand. A retrospective at the MoMA, Met or Tate Modern cements an artist's place in the hierarchy. A museum's stamp of legitimacy (whether via exhibit or a place in the permanent collection) does wonders for making collectors feel comfortable and for driving prices up (the lack of these hallmarks is also a sure signal of an artist either unknown or on the decline). While museum curators are for the most part independent thinkers, Thompson argues that the power of the branded galleries to influence the process of selecting which artists get what attention is too strong to underestimate.
• Critics are deemed to have only a small contributing influence in this mix, generally drowned out by the more powerful influences of galleries, museums and collectors.
  

Thompson then lays across this playing field the subject of prices for individual works, which are influenced (up and down) by the behaviors of all these players and strengths of their relative brands, all contributing to the location of the artist in the hierarchy (with the assumption that price and location are related). Psychology, momentum, scarcity, and adjacent reference points all come together to set current prices, which often seem to have little relation to any definition of "value" or "quality".

This book is full of statistical tidbits and surprising numbers, trying to quantify what is inherently a subjective enterprise, and many of these are unexpected and insightful. It also does a good job of making more transparent the complex economic relationships between various players (going into detail on auction house guarantees, dealer/artist contracts, etc.). Overall, while the market has changed meaningfully due to the changing economic conditions, the book's main points are still relevant and persuasive.

Collector's POV: As collectors ourselves, I found much of Thompson's analysis to be generally on the mark, even if I do think that collectors at the top end of the contemporary market are not necessarily representative of the behavior of all the collectors down the food chain (like us) - as an example, I don't think people who collect emerging work are as influenced by others as those at the top; by definition, they are trying to make their own way and find their own winners. That said, this book certainly made me think about how brands influence our own activity as collectors, and to what extent those brands change the way we view the photographs we ultimately add to our collection. We like to think we make our decisions based on our own personal vision of the best of what is available. How much of that world view has been spun by great marketing all around us? That's a hard question, worth pondering.