“Many outsiders see the art world as elitist… and it is, except it is also oddly down-to-earth and embracing of oddballs who don’t fit in well anywhere else.” – Sarah Thornton, author of Seven Days in the Art World, an account of seven defining experiences in today’s art scene (from The Biennale in Venice to The Studio Visit at Murakami’s Japanese workspace). [Paper Magazine's Dec/Jan issue - not online yet]
We just finished reading Sarah Thornton’s brilliantly readable and wonderful and didactic-without-lecturing book Seven Days in the Art World. And the thing that struck us, in between parsing the minutiae of Artforum vs artforum.com’s editorial relationship and trying to figure out how to reasonably make friends with L.A. gallerists Blum & Poe, was how much of a period piece it was.
Thornton’s book, which came out earlier this month, is, like most books, the product of years and years of research and (in her case, participant) observation and work and is so rooted in a time before now. What struck us the most about Seven Days, though, was how we were unable to read it without the feeling that this was a historical snapshot rather than a contemporary glimpse. Reading about collectors waiting like nervous racehorses before the opening of the Art Basel gates and seeing the way in which galleries controlled which buyers got access to which artists, how being on the list to buy a piece of art was as much an important accomplishment as the purely fiscal ability to acquire, all seemed like a dramatized version of a past we vaguely remember.
“ How is The National not on here? Practically every song on Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers would fit... ” posted on 10 Songs to Soundtrack Your Romantic Crisis on
“ Mark Stern,existential psychologists,existential psychologists boston,existential... ” posted on images4 on
“ Johnny & Tim ” posted on Directors and Their On-Screen Muses on
“ Thomas Mann's "Dr Faustus". ” posted on An Essential Postmodern Reading List on
“ Pedro and Penelope! ” posted on Directors and Their On-Screen Muses on
