In just half a century of growth, the art fair industry has transformed the art market. Now, for the first time, art market journalist Melanie Gerlis tells the story of art fairs' rapid ascent and reflects on their uncertain future. From the first post-war European art fairs built on the imperial 19th-century model of the International Exhibitions, to the global art fairs of the 21st century and their new online manifestations, it's a tale of many twists and turns. The book brings to life the people, places and philosophies that enabled art fairs to take root, examines the pivotal market periods when they flourished, and maps where they might go in a much-changed world.

A poignant and painfully funny novel about the New York art world by the acclaimed author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself For two first-class years, Joan Freeley had it all: the perfect family, the best art dealer in Manhattan, and the admiration of famous friends. Her adoring husband and two handsome sons attended her first gallery show in matching khakis and blue blazers. “An Interesting Talent Makes Its Debut,” declared the New York Times. Then, as if her success were nothing more than a booking error, Joan’s life got downgraded. A brutal divorce led to paintings too bitter to sell and a career stuck firmly in coach. Unable to see her suffer alone any longer, Joan’s teenage son Richard leaves his father and older brother in Los Angeles and moves in to her one-bedroom apartment in SoHo. At the gallery openings where she used to be a star, Richard discovers just how much his mother’s light has dimmed. She is an artist who is not showing—she might as well be invisible. To acknowledge her is to acknowledge the thin line between success and failure in a world as superficial as it is intoxicating. Richard immediately devotes himself to returning his mother to her former glory. Everything about him—the clothes he wears, the jokes he makes, the college he attends—is calculated to boost Joan’s reputation. But as the years go by and the galleries keep sending back her slides, Richard has to ask: Who wants Joan Freeley’s resurrection more—him or her? And when will his own life start?

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the national bestselling author of The River and The Dog Stars comes a "carefully composed story about one man’s downward turning life in the American West” (The Boston Globe). After having shot a man in a Santa Fe bar, the famous artist Jim Stegner served his time and has since struggled to manage the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him. Now he lives a quiet life ... until the day that he comes across a hunting guide beating a small horse, and a brutal act of new violence rips his quiet life right open. Pursued by men dead set on retribution, Jim is left with no choice but to return to New Mexico and the high-profile life he left behind, where he’ll reckon with past deeds and the dark shadows in his own heart. Look for Peter Heller's new novel, The Last Ranger, coming soon!

The first major history of the glamorous art biennial. Biennials have proliferated across the globe since the end of the Cold War and have now stabilized at about 200 a year. While this quintessentially contemporary form has significant roots in the world expositions of the 19th century, Jones argues that the biennial is also the platform for an important new aesthetic shift. Moving away from a focus on visual looking in the mid 20th century, the art world today embraces experience: art fairs give the feel of closeness and spaciousness, crowds, and they engage all our senses, even taste. Jones argues that the dominance of installation art and the simultaneous rise of biennialsor recurring art fairsneed to be examined as joint phenomenamutually reinforcing and linked to specific geo-political and aesthetic conditions. From the rise of tourism to the flows of art commerce, Jones hatches a new way to track the development of international art fairs in nearly every corner of the globe: from the early world fairs of London, Paris, Chicago, and New York to art fairs proper in Venice, Sao Paulo, Havana, Berlin, Lyon, and Beijing, as well as Kassel s Documenta, Whitney Biennial, and moreall explained through a rapidly evolving aesthetics of experience that has never, until now, been addressed in such a substantial way."

The Making of the American Creative Class narrates the history of workers in New York's publishing, advertising, design, and broadcasting industries and their efforts to improve their working conditions, set against the backdrop of the economic dislocations of twentieth-century capitalism.

The first major publication with a focus on contemporary art that reflects on a pre- and post-Windrush Caribbean/British movement This fascinating book traces the connection between Britain and the Caribbean in the visual arts from the 1950s to today, a social and cultural history more often told through literature or popular music. With its multi-generational perspective, it reveals that the Caribbean connection in British art is one of the richest facets of art in Britain since the Second World War, and is a lens through which to understand the Caribbean diasporic experience in all its social, cultural, psychological, and political complexities across generations. Features over 40 artists, including Aubrey Williams, Donald Locke, Horace Ové, Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson, Peter Doig, Hurvin Anderson, Grace Wales Bonner, and Alberta Whittle.

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.

A nearly-wordless picture book about a group of rats who mix up a sign for an Art Fair, and instead create a jolly Rat Fair. A compassionate young boy steps up to save them from the humans who would sweep their festivities away. When a group of industrious, fun-loving rats find letters fallen from an Art Fair sign, they put the sign back together—with one small adjustment—and get to work creating a spectacular RAT FAIR. Their fair is ruined when humans sweep away everything the rats have created. Undaunted, the rats switch gears and start working on their very own Rat Art Fair. As they are wrapping up their first day of the Rat Art Fair, a human child who has been following their progress from the sidelines catches them red handed, and the rats must decide if they can trust the child. A nearly wordless tale about how misunderstandings can lead to wonderful creativity.

Aimed at collectors and investors, this user-friendly guide explains art's value as an asset through comparisons with more familiar investments, including property, shares and gold. It draws on extensive research and interviews with key players in these other markets, as well as the author’s own experience, to clarify the specifics of art as an asset class.