topic but fairly dry writing, Michael Lewis this is not, . . Abandoned at page.
This sequel to TheMillion Stuffed Shark falls flat, It had its moments in the first half, but I was trudging through it more than I ever did with its predecessor, and ultimately I have admitted defeat.
But there is one chapter that is totally worth reading and I found just as enjoyable and interesting as the entire first book: "The Art Market Crash of '.
" The economic down turn happened almost right after the release of TheMillion Stuffed Shark and it brought an opportunity to explore how such an event specifically effects the buying and selling of the art world.
Which is great. And interesting and captivating and I literally perked up a bit when I got to this section,
"Authenticating Warhol" was another chapter that sticks out in my mind as new and different, . .
Overall though, I found this book to cover the same concepts I had read before just bolstered with different examples, All that stuff was enlightening and fascinating the first time around, but this sequel is more like a remixed repeat than an extension of a really interesting topic.
Except for "The Art Market Crash of ', " Go read it. Third chapter. Don Thompson popisuje prostredi vrcholku spolecenske/financni/umelecke pyramidy, Predstavuje jednotlive hrace a jejich menici se roli v oblasti prodeje umeni, Poutave naspana analyza tedy zahrnuje galerie, aukcni domy, obchodniky, umelce i zakazniky, Jako bonus ctenar obdrzi porci barvitych pribehu a historek, Autor na cele prostredi pohlizi s odstupem a obcasnym jen tezko skryvanym sarkasmem, Hlavni tezi cele knihy je to ze prodej je ovladan pribehem skutecnym nebo vybajenym, financni spekulaci, ekonomickymi zajmy jednotlivych hracu a rivalitou mezi konkurenty, Don Thompson toho o prostredi soucasneho umeni vi hodne a nevaha se podelit, Interesting stuff. Anyway, can rich ppl stop Acquiring contemporary art is about passion and lust, but it is also about branding, about the back story that comes with the art, about the relationship of money and status, and, sometimes, about celebrity.
The Supermodel and the Brillo Box follows Don Thompson'sbestseller TheMillion Stuffed Shark and offers a further journey of discovery into what the Crash ofdid to the art market and the changing methods that the major auction houses and dealerships have implemented since then.
It describes what happened to that market after the economic implosion following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and offers insights and artworld tales from dealers, auction houses, and former executives of each, from New York and London to Abu Dhabi and Beijing.
It begins with the story of a wax, trophystyle, nude upperbody sculpture of supermodel Stephanie Seymour by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, which sold for,million to New York übercollector and private dealer Jose Mugrabi, and recounts the story of a wooden Brillo box that sold for,, The Supermodel and the Brillo Box looks at the increasing dominance of Christie's, Sotheby's, and a few über dealers the hundreds of millions of new museums coming up in cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Beijing the growing importance of the digital art world and the shrinking role of the mainstream gallery.
The economics are somewhat interesting, but the "back stories" are LIFE, I love modern art. I love it a little less after reading this book, Seems dealers control this world and drive up prices for the big artists, In a great deal of cases they create the demand for those artists, However, there are some really fun stories about exhibitions I wish I had seen, . . especially some of the more stuntlike pieces, One artist actually copies all the pieces from a show across the street and that is his show, Good stuff. And there will always be artist like Banksy that can take on the world via the internet, . So I am still a fan, . . but the inside look was a little to business business business for me, This is the sequel to sitelinkTheMillion Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, sitelinkwhich I rather enjoyed, However, while "sequel" implies a new story with the same characters, Supermodel is more an extension of the previous book, It brings us three years past theglobal economic meltdown, showing how little effect vaporizing trillions of dollars of wealth affected the people who buy wallmountable nude busts of Stephanie Seymour at auction in New York.
The author's core concept from Shark remains unchanged: "branded" collectors buy contemporary art by "branded" artists via "branded" galleries or at auction at "branded" auction houses, sometimes donating the works to "branded" museums.
The vast amounts of money poured into this enterprise becomes fuel for a selflicking ice cream cone of a market that operates like nothing Adam Smith could have imagined on an absinthe high.
He extends this core concept by adding two refinements:
What job does a buyer "hire" a work of art to do This borrows a common economic theory of valuesetting to explain why a collector will spend what looks to the rest of us like crazy money for a particular artwork or an entire collection.
Does the art function as a marker for social currency Belonging to a particular social or economic class Power Taste Aesthetic pleasure
Backstory can be as important as branding in enhancing the marketability of a particular work or artist.
Who used to own the work Did it figure in a scandal Did something unusual happen to it The story of casino mogul Steve Wynn sticking his elbow through a Picasso, leading to an increase in its market value, gets another airing here.
So what's new The auction houses had a couple of bad years around, not so much because their clients had no money they still had plenty, but because those clients thought it would look bad to spend millions on reproduction Brillo boxes attributed to Warhol's famous Factory while laying off thousands of workers in real factories.
Instead, the action moved to private sales, in which a gallery or privatetreaty specialist at Sotheby's or Christie's would put a seller and buyer together behind the scenes to complete a sale.
Private treaty sales moved merchandise under the radar, leaving the terms and even participants more opaque than auction sales can be, Auctions got their groove back with theseason, but private treaty sales are still big business,
Thompson also discusses the rise of the "branded" art fair, Art fairs gala events that bring together collectors, galleries, and metric tons of champagne to create the art world's version of a rugby scrum were originally the art dealers' revenge on the auction houses for trespassing on their primary sales i.
e. , selling artworks for the first time, fresh from the artist's workshop, By the time Supermodel released, the handful of fairs extant in the Naughties had multiplied Tribblelike into dozens, soon to be hundreds, with the Art Basel and Frieze franchises becoming the artfair equivalents to Gagosian and White Cube.
At the time of writing, some galleries were scoring up toof their sales at fairs,
Thompson is an economist, not an art insider, He looks at the business and economics of art without trying to parse the tangled language of aesthetics or meaning, Fortunately, he doesn't write like an economist he still takes care to define the more abstruse language used by both his kind and the artsy set.
His prose is generally clear and sometimes entertaining, He's arranged his chapters each of which reads like an essay you might find in the NYT Sunday Arts section in seven roughly thematic sections, There are a very few pictures in the middle to give you an idea of what this stuff looks like, though you'll be better served by Google,
Not all is bright primary color, This book released inthe intervening five years are like half a century in artmarket years, so the lists of hot artists and galleries are mostly outdated by now.
It's been a while since I read Shark, but I had an impression that this book isn't as well organized as the older one, and doesn't hold as strong a throughline.
That could be because this is, as I mentioned, more an update than a new story, You really do need to read Shark to get the full backstory for the trends that Thompson continues to develop here, If this gets your motor going, sitelinkThe Orange Balloon Dog: Bubbles, Turmoil and Avarice in the Contemporary Art Market, the third book in the trilogy, brings the story up to, when things are no doubt more headshakingly bizarre than an eon ago in.
I read Georgina Adam's sitelinkDark Side of the Boom: The Excesses Of The Art Market In Thest Century immediately before Supermodel sitelinkreview here.
They cover roughly the same time frame Boom goes tobut have two different goals, Adam is a insider who considers the bigpicture trends in the art market, while Thompson is more interested in the microeconomic workings of the industry, While they talk about some of the same themes, they complement rather than conflict with each other,
The Supermodel and the Brillo Box is a continuation of the outsider analysis started in TheMillion Stuffed Shark, updating it by a few years and bringing us up on new wrinkles in the evermetastisizing business of selling art.
If you read Shark, some amount of this book is review and you may get only three' worth of value out of it, If you're new to the series, you'll be coming to
this material fresh, and it should be a fourstar experience for you, In either case, you'll be either appalled by or envious of the hijinks chronicled within, .