A fly-on-the-wall account of the the contemporary art market's subcultures

An experienced art writer, historian and sociologist based in London, Sarah Thornton is known to contribute to prestigious online and offline publications about the art market mechanics, artists’ working lives and human behavior in cultural context.

Her ‘Seven Days in the Art World’ throws light on the hierarchies that structure this world of money and power based on several juicy quotes from key 'players' in the market, alluding to power play and status anxiety. A pertinent question posed by Thornton is: “How is a consensus on any artwork or artist ever reached? According to her, the super-rich acquire works for social reasons as she goes on to describe the excesses of modern art world with panache.

With her new sizzling and searing account of the art world, she ventures into a statusphere, dealing with the market players’, and focusing on seven different days – spread over a span of three years & five countries. Describing the settings for the plot, an introductory essay to the book describes it as a fly-on-the-wall account of the strange and smart subcultures that make, curate, trade, collect, hype, and govern contemporary art.”

The dramatic account considers why art has become a sought after commodity through a unique time format and chain of events. Day one at an auction in New York is followed by a peculiar student seminar in California; next, a fair in Basel; Turner Prize judging process at the Tate; and then with a magazine in Manhattan. A studio visit in Toyama and the Venice Biennale’s launch marks the last couple of days of her gripping sojourn that provide a peep into the subtle power dynamics, which animates all the interconnected milieus.

‘Seven Days in the Art World’ (Paperback; 287 pages) builds a series of non-fiction narratives, which astutely reveal the inner functioning of the institutions contributing to an individual artist’s place in broader art history. The author reveals the fast chaining dynamics of creativity, modern taste, money, new found status, and the search for meaning. Woven in a beautifully paced and user friendly narrative, she constructs and investigates the drama of an international auction scene, the behind-the-scenes activities in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite crowd at the art fair, the art fraternity’s eccentricities, the workings behind a major art award, moments in an art-school seminar, and last but not the least, the Venice Biennale’s wonderland.