
Why would a smart New York investment banker pay $12 million for the decaying, stuffed carcass of a shark? By what alchemy does Jackson Pollock's drip painting No. 5, 1948 sell for $140 million? Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored. This book is the first to look at the economics and the marketing strategies that enable the modern art market to generate such astronomical prices. Drawing on interviews with both past and present executives of auction houses and art dealerships, artists, and the buyers who move the market, Thompson launches the reader on a journey of discovery through the peculiar world of modern art. Surprising, passionate, gossipy, revelatory, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark reveals a great deal that even experienced auction purchasers do not know.
Publisher:
New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
Edition:
1st Palgrave Macmillan ed
ISBN:
9780230610224
0230610226
0230610226
Branch Call Number:
709.049 T469t 2008
Characteristics:
268 p., [8] p. of plates : ill. (chiefly col.) ; 25 cm
Alternative Title:
Twelve million dollar stuffed shark
12 million dollar stuffed shark
12 million dollar stuffed shark


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Add a CommentI have always wondered how modern art was judged. Now I have some idea. This book tells all you need to know or didn't want to know.
Great read to grasp the pure economics behind the art world today. A bit repetitive and not delivering much more information than numbers and economic relations.