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Title details for Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton - Available

Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton
Tavia Gilbert
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
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2 of 2 copies available
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    December 23, 2014

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781494527686
      • File size: 240787 KB
      • Duration: 08:21:38

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Tavia Gilbert is upbeat and crisp as she narrates Thornton's ethnographic investigation of the modern art world. Thornton spends a day in each of seven different art environments: Christie's auction house, an all-day MFA art critique class, the Basel Art Fair, the site of the Turner Prize in London, ARTFORUM magazine, Takashi Murakami's art studio, and the Venice Biennale. It all involves dizzying amounts of money, self-conscious artists, pseudo-intellectual jargon, and provocative sculptures built by an army of workers. Gilbert keeps the listener's attention as she adeptly delivers the sly humor and sense of wonder. It's also an artistic trip around the world. Gilbert takes the smart route by only occasionally adopting an accent, but her choice does mean some loss of the international flavor, and one may forget that one is in Switzerland or Japan or Britain. A.B. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from June 16, 2008
      The hot, hip contemporary art world, argues sociologist Thornton, is a cluster of intermingling subcultures unified by the belief, whether genuine or feigned, that “nothing is more important than the art itself.” It is a conviction, she asserts, that has transformed contemporary art into “a kind of alternative religion for atheists.” Thornton, a contributor to Artforum.com and the New Yorker
      , presents an astute and often entertaining ethnography of this status-driven world. Each of the seven chapters is a keenly observed profile of that world's highest echelons: a Christie's auction, a “crit” session at the California Institute of the Arts and the Art Basel art fair. The chapter on auctions (where one auction-goer explains, “t's dangerous to wear Prada.... You might get caught in the same outfit as three members of Christie's staff”) is one of the book's strongest; the author's conversations about the role of the art critic with Artforum
      editor-in-chief Tim Griffin and the New Yorker
      's Peter Schjeldahl are edifying. Thornton offers an elegant, evocative, sardonic view into some of the art world's most prestigious institutions. 8 illus.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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