Review: Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton

Alastair Sooke
Published: 12:01AM BST 22 Oct 2008


Christie's, New York, May 2007, where a Warhol painting was sold for a record $71.7million What's art got to do with it? The modern art scene is all about air-kissing, gossip and shenanigans, says Alastair Sooke

Something is rotten in the world of contemporary art. Banks keep toppling like ninepins. The world's stock markets plunge ever deeper into the abyss. Yet the art trade appears to be invulnerable, with dealers, gallery owners and collectors whooping it up at exhibition openings every night of the week. Haven't they heard the story about Nero and his violin?

Earlier this month, for instance, hundreds of insiders, socialites, freeloaders, gossip-mongers and sundry other hangers-on flocked to the opening of the new Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea. Outside, on the red carpet, paparazzi flashbulbs lit up the evening sky; inside, the never-ending pop of champagne corks competed with the high-pitched patter of frantic socialising.

As I circulated the vast building, feeling as though I was descending ever deeper into the inferno, I couldn't help thinking of the famous set-piece in Tom Wolfe's 1980s satire The Bonfire of the Vanities, when the Wall Street bond trader Sherman McCoy visits an exceptionally smart party on Fifth Avenue: 'Such ecstasy on all sides! Such radiant eyes and fireproof grins! So many boiling teeth!'

Last month was a similar story, when the most powerful plutocrats on the planet flew to London to bid for 223 new works of art by Damien Hirst at Sotheby's. During the flagship evening auction, 56 lots sold for £70.5 million - just hours after news had filtered through that Lehman Brothers had gone bankrupt.

By the end of the two-day sale, Hirst had made £111.5 million. The contrast between his exorbitant profit and the woeful economic outlook for the rest of the world could not have been more dramatic.

But within hours of the hammer coming down on the final lot, rumours started to fly around, questioning the sale's record-breaking success. For many critics, the sale represented the conflation of aesthetic worth and monetary value that has infected almost every aspect of the contemporary scene over the past two decades.

The time is surely ripe for an investigation into the shady shenanigans of this notoriously secretive world.

Sadly, Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World, which took the author five years to research and write, is not a whistle-blowing piece of reportage. But it is a definitive primer to the ever-booming contemporary art scene.

Each of its seven chapters offers an in-depth examination of a different facet of today's art world based on up to 40 substantial interviews and many hours of what she calls 'behind-the-scenes "participant observation"'.

The book opens with a quietly caustic pen-portrait of an evening auction at Christie's in New York in 2004, and ends with an account of Thornton's trip to last year's Venice Biennale, a fiesta of air-kissing and non-stop gossip.

In between are absorbing fly-on-the-wall pieces about the annual Art Basel fair in Switzerland, the Turner Prize, and a fascinating visit to the studio of Japanese art superstar Takashi Murakami.

An academic with a PhD in sociology, Thornton is predominantly interested in human behaviour, and much of the book describes the hierarchies that structure this world of money and power.

The hotel one stays in during the Venice Biennale, for instance, is of paramount importance: Thornton checks in to a 'humble' pensione full of low-budget critics and curators, while the wealthiest dealers and collectors do business by the pool of the Cipriani.

Thornton's access is impeccable, and her book contains many juicy quotes from key 'players' such as Tate supremo Nicholas Serota. My favourite is from veteran New York art dealer Barbara Gladstone who, dressed head-to-toe in black Prada, bemoans the cramped booths at Art Basel: 'It is like being a whore in Amsterdam. You're trapped in these little rooms and there is no privacy whatsoever.'

Power play and status anxiety are recurrent themes. Dealers squabble over prime locations for their booths at art fairs. Collectors cajole to ensure that they are first in line to acquire a new 'masterpiece'. Big auctions are characterised as highly stylised ceremonies of cocksure strutting. City boys who want to speculate on art as a commodity are seen as the lowest of the low.

It is amusing to read about so many puffed-up people jostling to be top dog. The effect is a bit like a David Attenborough wildlife documentary transposed to the maddening but intoxicating world of contemporary art and given a satirical twist. The whole decadent scene is crying out for tart novelistic treatment by this generation's Tom Wolfe.

One of the more serious questions posed by the book is: how is a consensus on a particular work of art or artist ever reached? According to Thornton, the answer is that the super-rich buy art for social reasons. Taste, she argues, is determined by the vagaries of fashion; 'collecting art has increasingly become like buying clothes'.

This strikes me as probably true, but Thornton still doesn't get to the bottom of why particular artists become popular at particular times. There is very little, for instance, about the recent fads for Russian and Chinese art at auction.

Thornton also fails to explain why a painting by, say, Francis Bacon - which is, after all, nothing but pigment on canvas - generates quite so much pandemonium when it comes up for sale. Why have humans evolved to make status symbols of their art?

Thornton is at her best when she keeps one eye on her moral compass, writing with a satirist's ferocious passion. 'Dwight Titan', her pseudonym for a preening collector in his late seventies, would not have been out of place in The Bonfire of the Vanities.

But her approach can feel limited. She describes the excesses of today's art world with energy, clarity and panache, but, in the final reckoning, she doesn't actually dig up that much dirt. We get a clear sense of quackery and monstrous egos, but the art world's murkier goings-on are rarely illuminated.

Perhaps this is because, as she reveals in her acknowledgments, Thornton invited some interviewees to read draft chapters and offer feedback. This was surely a mistake. Soliciting the consent of powerful people before publication is a sure-fire way to smooth, rather than ruffle, feathers.

As a result, Thornton is too much like a toothless court jester. She is indulged by the art world's great and good, but when it comes to really spilling the beans, she is ignored.