Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

THE SUPERMODEL AND THE BRILLO BOX: Back Stories from the Curious World of Contemporary Art

Donald N. Thompson

A revelatory look at the contemporary art market and the economics and psychology that first produced a market crash and then two years later resulted in astronomical prices.

Acquiring contemporary art is about passion and lust, but it is also about branding, about the back story that comes with the art, about the relationship of money and status, and sometimes, about celebrity. The Supermodel and the Brillo Box follows Thompson's 2008 book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, which sold in 14 territories and has sold 35,000 copies in North America. Anyone who loved the first book's journey of discovery into the economics and psychology of the contemporary art market will love this one too. But this new book is in itself a brilliant, self-sufficient introduction to a highly secretive industry. Written in highly readable, addictive prose, it describes what happened after the implosion following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and offers insights and art-world tales from dealers, auction houses, and their former executives, from New York and London to Abu Dhabi and Beijing, including new methods that auction houses and dealerships have implemented since 2008. It begins with the story of a wax, trophy-style, nude upper-body sculpture of former supermodel Stephanie Seymour by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan which sold for $2.4 million to New York ueber-collector and private dealer Jose Mugrabi, and recounts the story of a wooden Brillo Box that sold for $722,500. The Supermodel and the Brillo Box looks at the increasing dominance of Christie's, Sotheby's, and a few ueber-dealers; the dominance and the hundreds of millions of dollars coming from new museums in Dubai, Qatar and Beijing; the growing importance of the digital art world; and the shrinking role of the mainstream gallery. DON THOMPSON is an economist and emeritus Nabisco Brands Professor of marketing and strategy at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto. He has an MBA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at Harvard Business School and the London School of Economics. He is the author of eleven books. He writes on the economics of the art market for publications as diverse as The Times, Harper's , and The Art Economist. He lives in Toronto. Various review quotes for THE $12 MILLION STUFFED SHARK appear on Macmillan's website page: http://us.macmillan.com/the12millionstuffedshark/DonThompson

Available products
Book Published 2014-05-01 by Palgrave Macmillan (W-E)

Comments

http://nypost.com/2014/04/27/inside-the-mad-world-of-modern-art/

"Thompson offers genuine insights into the role of branding in building value as well as the changing structure of the global economy." Booklist

Centrepolygraph

"An information-loaded, economic look at contemporary art."

Ariel

"An engaging and focused analysis of the market players." Publishers Weekly

Kniha Zlin

"Don delivers entertaining and thoughtful insights into the inner workings of the art business, and does so in style! Check for Don's pointers on how to play the quiz of the contemporary art market. Very rewarding reading." Sergey Skaterschikov, Founder

"Lively, enthusiastic, opinionated and fun to read." The Financial Times

"In this engaging sequel to the author's previous work, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark... Thompson reveals the new rules for art and commerce that have come into play, and the new players that have come into the market... Anyone interested in the contemporary art world will discover plenty of familiarity and much of interest in the dark new universe documented in The Supermodel and the Brillo Box. That said, there is one subject that the reader will not find addressed in this otherwise excellent account: As the rules for selling 21st-century art are turned upside down, what will define the art and artist in the years ahead? The answer to this question will hopefully be the focus of Thompson's next book." The Globe and Mail

Kniha Zlin

"An engaging and focused analysis of the market players."

"Don Thompson now probably knows more about the madhouse world of contemporary art and auction houses than anyone else on the planet. Yet it still suits him to play the bemused economics professor (which he is), entering this weird parallel universewhich produces an astonishing £25 billion of sales a year and asking seemingly naive questions that produce eye-popping answers. Early on in this enthralling book, for instance, he discusses why an art collector would pay $2.4 million for a kitsch nude waxwork of "someone else's wife", when "the same sum might buy a modest Monet or Picassoor an actual trophy wife". Answering that and a thousand similar queries has now provided Thompson with enough deliciously bizarre anecdotes to fill two books... [The Supermodel and the Brillo Box] is a fascinating survey of a bewildering world. Read it and you will feel that Karl Marx's sour assertion that art "will find favour with the bourgeois only when presented as being able to generate material wealth" has never rung so true. Everyone in this world, it seems, is in it for the money. Love of the actual art comes a very poor second, if that."

"An information-loaded, economic look at contemporary art." Kirkus

"He invokes product-value arguments out of 'Mad Men' and investment strategies out of 'Dilbert' alongside meaningful analogies."

"Lively, enthusiastic, opinionated and fun to read."

"A highly readable account of the booming market for contemporary art, post 2008. Art economist Don Thompson lays bare the world of high-octane auctions, canny collectors, culture-hungry new economies and opaque million-dollar art deals." Georgina Adam, art market columnist

"Thompson offers genuine insights into the role of branding in building value as well as the changing structure of the global economy."

"I started reading The Supermodel and the Brillo Box and could not put it down until I finished it! Interesting to read about a world one knows well looked at through a different perspective. For anyone who wants to learn about the art market is a must read." (Ordovas gallery, London, and former deputy chairman for Postwar and Contemporary art, Christie's Europe)

"Don Thompson now probably knows more about the madhouse world of contemporary art and auction houses than anyone else on the planet. Yet it still suits him to play the bemused economics professor (which he is), entering this weird parallel universewhich produces an astonishing £25 billion of sales a year and asking seemingly naive questions that produce eye-popping answers. Early on in this enthralling book, for instance, he discusses why an art collector would pay $2.4 million for a kitsch nude waxwork of "someone else's wife", when "the same sum might buy a modest Monet or Picassoor an actual trophy wife". Answering that and a thousand similar queries has now provided Thompson with enough deliciously bizarre anecdotes to fill two books... [The Supermodel and the Brillo Box] is a fascinating survey of a bewildering world. Read it and you will feel that Karl Marx's sour assertion that art "will find favour with the bourgeois only when presented as being able to generate material wealth" has never rung so true. Everyone in this world, it seems, is in it for the money. Love of the actual art comes a very poor second, if that."

"Bringing an economist's curiosity to the inner workings of the contemporary art market, Don Thompson manages once again to explain, in laymen's terms, how a lot of it works." (Sarah Douglas, Culture Editor)

"[An] informative an occasionally hilarious look at the surreal contemporary art market... A clear-headed approach to a frequently high-pitched issue."

Ariel