La jeunesse de Bacchus by William Bouguereau

BOOKS : 'Seven Days in the Art World' and 'Immoveable Feast'

— Reviewed by Mia Fineman and Dawn Drzal Published: December 10, 2008
Seven Days in the Art World By Sarah Thornton 274 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.

Hollywood, it has been said, is like high school with money: cliquish, catty and status-obsessed, awash in insecurity and plagued by conflicting desires to stand out and to fit in. The same might be said of the contemporary art world, particularly during the glitzy boom years chronicled by Sarah Thornton in her entertaining new book, "Seven Days in the Art World."

A freelance journalist with a background in sociology, Thornton spent five years air-kissing her way through art fairs, auction houses and artists' studios as a "participant observer" intent on decoding the manners and mores of this globe-trotting Prada-clad tribe. What she learned, among other things, is that wealthy collectors buy expensive works of art for a variety of reasons - vanity, social status, an appetite for novelty and, most important of all, an acute excess of money. As one of her auction house informers bluntly puts it, "After you have a fourth home and a G5 jet, what else is there?"

The book is cleverly divided into seven day-in-the-life chapters, each focusing on a different facet of the contemporary art world: an auction (at Christie's New York), an art school "crit" (at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia), an art fair (Art Basel), an artist's studio (that of the Japanese star Takashi Murakami), a prize (Britain's prestigious Turner Prize), a magazine (Artforum) and a biennale (Venice).

Thornton is a smart and savvy guide with a keen understanding of the subtle power dynamics that animate each of these interconnected milieus. In a vivid opening chapter, she captures the adrenaline-fueled atmosphere of an evening auction at Christie's, expertly parsing the status hierarchy of the salesroom seating plan (aisle seats for high rollers, private skyboxes for vendors, standing room for the press).

At the Venice Biennale, the conceptual artist John Baldessari tells her, "You can judge artists' stock prices based on how many parties they get invited to." At Art Basel, dealers vie for prime locations for their booths and then complain about the lack of privacy. Collectors try to wheedle their way onto closely guarded waiting lists for new work by the hottest art stars. Even placing an ad in Artforum requires a serious quotient of coolness. "Just because you can afford to pay doesn't mean you get in," one of the magazine's publishers sniffs.

The kind of research Thornton does is often described as "fly on the wall," but she prefers to think of herself as a "cat on the prowl." A good participant observer, she writes, is "like a stray cat ... curious and interactive but not threatening." This approach clearly gained her extraordinary access to an insular world not known for its openness or transparency. And while she's never overtly critical of the shenanigans she recounts, the early chapters are written with the amused skepticism of a well-informed outsider.

But somewhere along the line, Thornton's perspective shifts. Her questions become less challenging, her narratives more conciliatory. In short, she becomes an insider.

In her chapter on Artforum, she discloses that in exchange for access she agreed to write freelance dispatches for the magazine's gossipy online diary, "Scene and Herd."

Did this hinder her ability to represent the magazine in an objective light? Maybe not. But as the art historian Thomas Crow says later in the same chapter, "There has to be a space between you and the people you're writing about, so you're not just echoing the situation you're trying to analyze."

Today, as the art market heads for its first major crash since 1990, the situation this book so engagingly echoes - new money's glamorous infatuation with new art - is rapidly coming to an end. Maybe now Thornton, or someone else, can tell us what it all meant. — Reviewed by Mia Fineman

REF>:http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/12/arts/bookven.php