Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton

  Back at the Cipriani, I have finished my quota of lengths. Scott Fitzgerald described writing as “swimming underwater and holding your breath.” Lawrence Alloway portrayed the Venice Biennale as “the avant-garde in a goldfish bowl.” I lie down on the side of the pool and enjoy the colliding currents of the two thoughts. While staring up into the blue void, I recall one more encounter.

  When I was in the Giardini, I ran into the artist Anish Kapoor. He represented the United Kingdom in 1990, so I asked him, What do you recollect most vividly from your year? “Hmm. I felt as if they were taking a risk with me,” he said. “I wasn’t British. I held an Indian passport, although I’d lived in the U.K. for however many years. I must have been among the youngest artists ever given the pavilion. It was a time when the obsession with youth was in its infancy. Of course, now it’s the way things are done, but it wasn’t then.” Kapoor looked pensive, then smiled. “I remember…It might have been the first day of the previews that year. There were thousands of people, as there always are.” He paused. “At lunchtime I went into one of the nicer restaurants near the Giardini and…everybody in the restaurant got up and started clapping.” Kapoor looked at me with genuine amazement. “It was completely spontaneous,” he said. “I was just a young guy. It was bizarre. It was wonderful.”

  Author’s Note

  With the exception of three collectors and one consignor (of artworks at auction) who requested pseudonyms, everyone else in this book is referred to by his or her real name.

  In the interests of narrative flow, I sometimes found it necessary to practice what I call “displaced nonfiction,” in which a quote completed in a phone call is situated “on location” in a real art world scene.

  The actual days on which the chapters take place were: “The Auction,” Wednesday, 10 November 2004; “The Crit,” Friday, 17 December 2004; “The Fair,” Tuesday, 13 June 2006 (with some encounters from Tuesday, 15 June 2004); “The Prize,” Monday, 4 December 2006; “The Magazine,” Wednesday, 14 February 2007; “The Studio Visit,” Friday, 6 July 2007; “The Biennale,” Saturday, 9 June 2007.

  Ethnography is a genre of writing with roots in anthropology that aims to generate holistic descriptions of social and cultural worlds. Its main research method, “participant observation,” is a cluster of qualitative tools, which include firsthand experience of the environment, visual observation, attentive listening, interviewing, and analysis of key documents. Babies learn how to walk and talk through investigation and involvement; participant observation is a self-conscious formalization and acceleration of the naturalistic modes through which we learn generally.

  Acknowledgments

  Ethnographic research is a collaborative endeavor. During the course of my fieldwork, I would often speak to someone for ten minutes with my notebook in hand. It wasn’t a proper interview, but I might still learn a lot. I had revealing chats with hundreds of people whom I never interviewed formally, from Nan Goldin and Richard Prince to Charles Saatchi and Larry Gagosian. Some of these encounters are recounted in this book, but the vast majority remain scrawled in one of my forty-seven blue notebooks.

  I am particularly indebted to my interviewees (more than 250 of them, listed below) for being so generous with their thoughts. A handful of interviews were done on the phone, but most of them were conducted face-to-face in sessions lasting about an hour. Some people were kind enough to indulge me with repeated conversations (three to five interviews), gracious follow-up telephone calls, and patient replies to e-mails requesting that they answer just one more question. Also, as part of a practice called “reflexive ethnography,” the people who were quoted in a particular chapter had the opportunity to read what I wrote. Their feedback often led to a richer and more accurate account of their art world, and I’m exceptionally appreciative of those who took this extra time.

  For letting me intrude upon their workplaces, many thanks to Michael Asher and the students of “Post-Studio Art” at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts); Tony Korner and the entire staff of Artforum International; and Takashi Murakami and his Kaikai Kiki team, particularly Yuko Sakata and Joshua Weeks. Thanks also to the PR people who went beyond the call of duty to ease my access to or understanding of their spheres: Erica Bolton in London, Flavio Del Monte in Milan, Sara Fitzmaurice and Peter Vetsch with regard to Basel. Many thanks also to Toby Usnik and his staff at Christie’s.

  I’m especially grateful to Victoria Miro, who, out of munificence rather than need, found me work in her gallery, which included the pleasure of cocurating a photography group show. I am also thankful for the support of the magazine editors for whom I’ve freelanced over the course of researching this project: Robert Violette and Bruce Millar (formerly of Tate Magazine), Rebecca Wilson and Charlotte Edwards (formerly of ArtReview), Patricia Bickers and Frederika Whitehead (of Art Monthly), Jack Bankowsky and Brian Sholis (at Artforum.com), and Susan Morrison of The New Yorker.

  With regard to the editing of Seven Days in the Art World, I am extremely lucky to have had the intelligent attention of Tom Mayer at W. W. Norton and Sara Holloway at Granta Books. Many thanks also to the people at these two excellent independent publishing companies who lent their talents to the copyediting, proofing, design, marketing, sales, and international distribution of the book. Moreover, I wouldn’t be writing these acknowledgments if it weren’t for my agent, David Kuhn, and his assistant, Billy Kings land, at Kuhn Projects in New York.

  This book was half written by the time it was signed to a publisher, so I am truly indebted to friends (and acquaintances who became friends) for their comments on various drafts. The following people were kind and helpful in several ways; many sank their teeth into the nitty-gritty of the arguments, characterizations, and language of different chapters. Thank you to Jennifer Allen, Andrew Berardini, Amy Cappellazzo, Caroline Cohen, Nikki Columbus, Charles Guarino, Vicky Hughes, Fiona Jack, Liz Jobey, Knight Landesman, Thomas Lawson, Nicholas Logsdail, Erin Manns, Angela McRobbie, Philippa Perry, Jeff Poe, Janet Sarbane, Kitty Scott, Glenn Scott Wright, Lucy Soutter, John Thompson, Louise Thornton Keating, Philip Watson, and Mika Yoshitake. I expect that they are as relieved as I am that the book is finished.

  Perhaps no one is more pleased than my parents, Glenda and Monte Thornton, whose emotional and financial backing was vital at every stage. My mother, who transcribed a few interviews, was often the first to read a desperately rough draft. I’d also like to thank my remarkably understanding children, Otto and Cora, who can only dimly remember a time when I was not working on this book. Finally, two people really got me through this project: my highly literate best friends, Helge Dascher and Jeremy Silver, who read every word, sometimes twice.

  In alphabetical order, my interviewees were Matt Aberle, Tomma Abts, Rupert Adams, Florian Maier Aichen, Michael Allen, Chiho Aoshima, Matthew Armstrong, Michael Asher, Josh Baer, Wayne Baerwaldt, John Baldessari, Fay Ballard, Jack Bankowsky, Eric Banks, Lynn Barber, Oliver Barker, Harry Blain, Iwona Blazwick, Tim Blum, Tanya Bonakdar, Francesco Bonami, Stefania Bortolami, Daniel Buchholz, Louisa Buck, Melva Bucksbaum, David Bunn, Chris Burden, Christopher Burge, Victor Burgin, Katharine Burton, Dan Cameron, Amy Cappellazzo, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Mariuccia Casadio, Sylvia Chivaratanond, Frank Cohen, Sadie Coles, Matthew Collings, Phil Collins, Stuart Comer, Nigel Cooke, Andree Coroon, Michael Craig-Martin, Martin Creed, Thomas Crow, Stuart Cumberland, Elizabeth Porter Daane, Thomas Dane, Adrian Dannatt, Corinne de Beche, Massimo De Carlo, Maria de Corral, Jeremy Deller, Thomas Demand, Bea de Souza, Ziba de Weck, Leslie Dick, Anna Katrina Dolven, Marlene Dumas, Sam Durant, Cliff Einstein, Inka Essenhigh, Stuart Evans, Russell Ferguson, Darren Flook, Sasha Weld Forester, Carl Freedman, Jose Freire, Joe Friday, Simon Frith, Charles Gaines, Anya Gallacio, Gary Garrels, Jeff Gibson, Massimiliano Gioni, Mark Gisbourne, Barbara Gladstone, Nicholas Glass, Teresa Gleadowe, Ingvild Goetz, Will Gompertz, Marian Goodman, Peter Gould, Cornelia Grassi, Tim Griffin, Giulio Gropello, Charles Guarino, Lotta Hammer, Jan Ha
shey, Shane Hassett, Margot Heller, Sandy Heller, Dave Hickey, Charlotte Higgins, Matthew Higgs, Stefan Hildebrandt, Damien Hirst, Jens Hoffman, Laura Hoptman, Vicky Hughes, Fiona Jack, Marc Jacobs, Alison Jacques, Christian Jankowski, William E. Jones, Dakis Jouannou, David Juda, Isaac Julien, Anish Kapoor, Francesca Kaufman, Samuel Keller, Mary Kelly, Martin Kersel, Idris Khan, Franz Koenig, Tony Korner, Richard Koshalek, Knight Landesman, Brandon Lattu, Steven Lavine, Thomas Lawson, Edward and Agnes Lee, Janet Lee, Simon Lee, Dominique Lévy, Jeremy Lewison, Rhonda Lieberman, Miriam Lloyd-Evans, Joseph Logan, Nicholas Logsdail, Loushy, Honey Luard, Daniella Luxembourg, Michele Maccarone, Tim Maguire, Loic Malle, Gio Marconi, Flavia Fossa Margutti, Tim Marlow, Danielle McConnell, Tom McDonough, Scott McFarland, Kate McGarry, Keir McGuiness, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Tobias Meyer, Jake Miller, Victoria Miro, Dominic Molon, Shamim M. Momin, Dave Muller, Iain Munroe, Takashi Murakami, Valeria Napoleone, Judith Nesbitt, Helena Newman, Seamus Nicolson, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Yoko Ono, Julian Opie, Francis Outred, Maureen Paley, Cornelia Parker, Martin Parr, Hirsch Perlman, Grayson Perry, Philippa Perry, Paola Pivi, Jeff Poe, Kelly Poe, Tal R, Michael Raedecker, Andrew Renton, Olivier Richon, Catsou Roberts, Emma Robertson, Polly Robinson, Andrea Rose, Andrea Rosen, Scott Rothkopf, Don and Mera Rubell, Perry Rubenstein, Kati Rubinyi, Ed Ruscha, Philip Rylands, Analia Saban, Yuko Sakata, Jerry Saltz, Elizabeth Schambelan, Paul Schimmel, Peter Schjeldahl, Kim Schoen, Barry Schwabsky, Jonathan Schwartz, Glenn Scott Wright, Kitty Scott, Adrian Searle, Zineb Sedira, Philippe Ségalot, Sir Nicholas Serota, Stuart Shave, George Shaw, Andrew Silewicz, Ross Sinclair, Debra Singer, Johanne Sloan, Matthew Slotover, Roberta Smith, Irit Sommer, Emet Sosna, Lucy Soutter, Nancy Spector, Lisa Spellman, Rochelle Steiner, Robert Storr, Jeremy Strick, Beth Swofford, David Teiger, Mark Titchner, Meg Troha, Keith Tyson, Dean Valentine, Christophe Van de Weghe, Francesco Vezzoli, Robin Vousden, Sheena Wagstaff, Jeff Wall, Rebecca Warren, Scott Watson, James Welling, Jack Wendler, Richard Wentworth, Damien Whitmore, Anthony Wilkinson, Christopher Williams, Andrew Wilson, Michael Wilson, Ari Wiseman, Nancy Wood, Bill Woodrow, Greville Worthington, Sharon Ya’ari, Ken Yeh, Shizuka Yokomizo, Mika Yoshitake, Linda Zuck, and a few people who wish to remain anonymous.

  Selected Bibliography

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  ———. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Cambridge: Polity, 1993.

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  Button, Virginia. The Turner Prize. London: Tate Publishing, 2005.

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  Crow, Thomas. Modern Art in the Common Culture. London: Yale University Press, 1996.

  De Coppet, Laura, and Alan Jones. The Art Dealers. New York: Cooper Square, 2002.

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  Foster, Hal, et al. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism. London: Thames and Hudson, 2004.

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  **In 2007, Pin
ault was ranked thirty-fourth in Forbes’s list of world billionaires. He has many luxury goods holdings, including the brands Gucci, Yves St. Laurent, Sergio Rossi, Balenciaga, and Château Latour.

  **Agnes Martin died shortly after this sale. Since then, Cecily Brown, Yayoi Kusama, Bridget Riley, Jenny Saville, Cindy Sherman, and Lisa Yuskavage have joined the ranks of living women artists whose work has broken the million-dollar mark at auction. One might think that the art world was at the vanguard of gender equality, but the disparities in price in an auction room are quite extreme. Although one finds many powerful women dealers and curators, the bulk of the big-spending collectors are male—a fact that no doubt contributes to the complex dynamic of undervaluation that befalls women’s artwork.

  *Jasper Johns’s False Start, which sold for $17.7 million at Sotheby’s in 1988, held the record for the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist at auction on and off for nineteen years, until Damien Hirst’s Lullaby Spring sold for $22.7 million in june 2007. The Hirst work was knocked off the top spot when Jeff Koons’s Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold) sold for $23.6 million in november 2007, and the Koons was cast aside when Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping sold for $33.6 million in May 2008. The buyers of these recent record-priced works were later revealed to be, respectively, the Sheikha Al Mayassa, Victor Pinchuk, and Roman Abramovich—three billionaires for whom these sums would seem to be small change.

  **Hirst told me in a 2005 interview that he intended to “quit spots,” but guesstimates have since increased to twelve hundred.

  **In May 2005, Richard Prince’s A Nurse Involved sold for $1,024,000. Prince’s prices have climbed steadily. In June 2008, a different “nurse painting” (Overseas Nurse) sold for $8.5 million.