An insider's detailed chronicle of the inner workings of the contemporary art world, now in paperback.

Provides career development advice for artists, including evaluating your work, submitting to museums and galleries, organizing events, using social media to promote your art, raising funds, and more.

A fly-on-the-wall account of the smart and strange subcultures that make, trade, curate, collect, and hype contemporary art. 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.

An insider’s detailed chronicle of the inner workings of the contemporary art world. The world of contemporary art has become more globalized and transparent in the last few decades, yet it is still perceived as closed-off and obscure. In A Year in the Art World, Matthew Israel takes the reader on a cross-continental journey through a year in the field of art, lifting the veil on a culture that emerges as diverse, adventurous, nuanced, and meaningful. From Los Angeles and New York to Paris and Hong Kong, Israel encounters artists, curators, critics, gallerists, and institutions, uncovering the working lives of these art-world figures from the renowned to the unseen. Drawing on exclusive interviews and expertly researched content, Israel ventures into the inner workings of the art industry to ask: What is it that people in the art world actually do? What drives interest in working with art? How do artworks acquire value? And how has technology transformed today’s art world? Anchoring the narrative in the history, economics, and cultural dynamics of the field, this fascinating story reveals how “the art world” describes a realm that is both surprisingly vast and deeply interconnected.

Discover the compelling story of the evolution of contemporary art, its state today, and where it’s headed, through a sample of ten artworks created by ten artists over a span of fifteen years. Written in an engaging, straightforward style by prominent art historian Matthew Israel, this book presents ten outstanding examples of contemporary art, each with significant historical or cultural relevance to contemporary art’s big picture. Drawn from the fields of photography, painting, performance, installation, video, film, and public art, the works featured here combine to create a bigger picture of the state of contemporary art today. From Andreas Gurskys large-scale color photograph “Rhine II” to Kara Walkers acclaimed installation in the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, each work is carefully explored within the larger perspective of its social and artistic milieu. Articulate and insightful, this book offers readers the ability to consider each work in-depth, while also providing an easily digestible foundation from which to study the often challenging but continually fascinating world of 21st-century art.

One year in the life of the students, teachers, and artists at one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious art colleges

“A comprehensive guide.” —Artspace. “Whether you are new to the business or a seasoned gallerist, it is always wise to remember the essentials.” —Leigh Conner, director, Conner Contemporary Art Aspiring and new art gallery owners can find everything they need to plan and operate a successful art gallery with How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery. This new edition has been updated to mark the changes in market and technology over the past decade. Edward Winkleman and Patton Hindle draw on their years of experience to explain step by step how to start your new venture. From finding the ideal locale and renovating the space to writing business plans and securing start-up capital, this helpful guide has it all. Chapters detail how to: Manage cash flow Grow your new business Hire and manage staff Attract and retain artists and clients Represent your artists Promote your gallery and artists online Select the right art fair And more How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery, Second Edition, also includes sample forms, helpful tips from veteran collectors and dealers, a large section on art fairs, and a directory of art dealer associations.

A best book of the year from New York Public Library, NPR, the Financial Times, Book Riot, and the Sunday Times (London). A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard. Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew. To his surprise and the reader’s delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns. In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All The Beauty in the World is a surprising, inspiring portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.

The meteoric rise of the largest unregulated financial market in the world-for contemporary art-is driven by a few passionate, guileful, and very hard-nosed dealers. They can make and break careers and fortunes. The contemporary art market is an international juggernaut, throwing off multimillion-dollar deals as wealthy buyers move from fair to fair, auction to auction, party to glittering party. But none of it would happen without the dealers-the tastemakers who back emerging artists and steer them to success, often to see them picked off by a rival. Dealers operate within a private world of handshake agreements, negotiating for the highest commissions. Michael Shnayerson, a longtime contributing editor to Vanity Fair, writes the first ever definitive history of their activities. He has spoken to all of today's so-called mega dealers-Larry Gagosian, David Zwirner, Arne and Marc Glimcher, and Iwan Wirth-along with dozens of other dealers-from Irving Blum to Gavin Brown-who worked with the greatest artists of their times: Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, and more. This kaleidoscopic history begins in the mid-1940s in genteel poverty with a scattering of galleries in midtown Manhattan, takes us through the ramshackle 1950s studios of Coenties Slip, the hipster locations in SoHo and Chelsea, London's Bond Street, and across the terraces of Art Basel until today. Now, dealers and auctioneers are seeking the first billion-dollar painting. It hasn't happened yet, but they are confident they can push the price there soon.