The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art

The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art | Don Thompson | Great Read

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The $12 Million St...

	The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art Don Thompson Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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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.

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Chandelier Bids

An excellent overview of the internal convoluted workings of the contemporary international art market. If you want to know what now goes into the pricing and marketing of big-time works of art, buy this book.

In the spirit of "Freakonomics", Don Thompson trains his economist's eye on the financial side of the current world of high-end art. Happily his book is written in a fashion to be understood, rather than as an academic exercise to befuddle.

Those seeking a recent book by a passionate collector of contemporary art may also wish to read Giuseppe Panza's "Memories of a Collector."

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Great Read

I'm more of a business and economics book reader than professed art reader and this book scratched that itch while adding something new and refreshing to my usual selections that kept me reading "just a few more pages".

Thompson does a great job of getting behind how these Goliaths of art like Hirst and Bacon were created and issues of valuation and branding that are easy to ignore in the "magic" of art. I found myself reading it on the subway and after work whenever I had a second and I finished it in a couple days, which is pretty fast for me.

Thompson never loses sight of the assumed intangibility of art--the inherent subjectivity--but encases it in economics in the same way vein as Freakonomics, and I've definitely finished this book with a few cocktail quotes and points that I've brought up in conversations.

This is a great read that I can recommend to business, economics, and art readers. Thompson walks the fine line of these areas to write a book that will engage them all.

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