Seven Days in the Art World
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Average rating3.7
A fly-on-the-wall account of the smart and strange subcultures that make, trade, curate, collect, and hype contemporary art. The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture.
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When I read books like this one, I sigh with relief that I am a humble librarian, completely unconcerned with the business aspects of the world that seem to have permeated our whole society, even, it seems, the art world. Thornton visits seven icons of the art world, and devotes a chapter of her book to each. It is a very complex world. I had the picture of the artist working diligently in his studio, oblivious of the demands of the world. That is not the picture Thornton presents. Instead, she shatters my every illusion of the art world, including its aloofness from the world, its isolation from workaday worries about money, its purity.
I know several artists who need to read this book.
