Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art, Hardcover

Description

A behind-the-scenes look at the egomaniacs, geniuses, and canny promoters who shaped the world of modern art and created the largest unregulated financial market in the world.
Before Damien Hirst stuffed a shark, before Basquiat picked up a spray can, before Andy Warhol started The Factory, a pile of unwanted Jackson Pollocks changed everything. From them emerged the first major modern art dealer. It was 1947, and the art world would never be the same.

From the early days on 57th Street, to the rise of SoHo in the 60s, to the emergence of Chelsea as the hotbed of art galleries, we see the meteoric rise and the devastating falls of the most renowned dealers: Larry Gagosian, David Zwirner, Arne Glimcher, and Iwan Wirth. With unparalleled access, the longtime Vanity Fair reporter tells us the story of contemporary art through the people who coddled, supported, and funded the likes of Jeff Koons, and Cy Twombly.

It's a story of backstabbing, betrayals, fruitful partnerships, genius, and ever larger sums of money. The world of contemporary art is inextricable from the wild wealth and naked financial opportunism that surrounds it.

About the author

Michael Shnayerson became a contributing editor at Vanity Fair in 1986 and has since written more than 75 stories for the magazine. Shnayerson is the author of The Car That Could: The Inside Story of GM's Revolutionary Electric Vehicle (Random House, 1996), which was named one of the best business books of 1996 by BusinessWeek; and he is the co-author, with Mark J. Plotkin, of The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise of Drug-Resistant Bacteria (Little, Brown, 2002). He lives in Bridgehampton, New York.