The Supermodel and the Brillo Box: Back Stories and Peculiar Economics from the World of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson

The Supermodel and the Brillo Box: Back Stories and Peculiar Economics from the World of Contemporary Art Reviews

• 
  Lance Charnes

  This is the sequel to
  The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art,
  which I rather enjoyed. However, while "sequel" implies a new story with the same characters, Supermodel is more an extension of the previous book. It brings us three years past the 2008 global economic meltdown, showing how little effect vaporizing trillions of dollars of wealth affected the people who buy wall-mountable nude busts of Stephanie Seymour at auction in New York.
  
  The author's core concept from Shark remains unchanged: "branded" collectors buy contemporary art by "branded" artists via "branded" galleries or at auction at "branded" auction houses, sometimes donating the works to "branded" museums. The vast amounts of money poured into this enterprise becomes fuel for a self-licking ice cream cone of a market that operates like nothing Adam Smith could have imagined on an absinthe high.
  
  He extends this core concept by adding two refinements:
  -- What job does a buyer "hire" a work of art to do? This borrows a common economic theory of value-setting to explain why a collector will spend what looks to the rest of us like crazy money for a particular artwork or an entire collection. Does the art function as a marker for social currency? Belonging to a particular social or economic class? Power? Taste? Aesthetic pleasure?
  -- Backstory can be as important as branding in enhancing the marketability of a particular work or artist. Who used to own the work? Did it figure in a scandal? Did something unusual happen to it? (The story of casino mogul Steve Wynn sticking his elbow through a Picasso, leading to an increase in its market value, gets another airing here.)
  
  So what's new? The auction houses had a couple of bad years around 2008-10, not so much because their clients had no money (they still had plenty), but because those clients thought it would look bad to spend millions on reproduction Brillo boxes attributed to Warhol's famous Factory while laying off thousands of workers in real factories. Instead, the action moved to private sales, in which a gallery or private-treaty specialist at Sotheby's or Christie's would put a seller and buyer together behind the scenes to complete a sale. Private treaty sales moved merchandise under the radar, leaving the terms and even participants more opaque than auction sales can be. Auctions got their groove back with the 2010-11 season, but private treaty sales are still big business.
  
  Thompson also discusses the rise of the "branded" art fair. Art fairs -- gala events that bring together collectors, galleries, and metric tons of champagne to create the art world's version of a rugby scrum -- were originally the art dealers' revenge on the auction houses for trespassing on their primary sales (i.e., selling artworks for the first time, fresh from the artist's workshop). By the time Supermodel released, the handful of fairs extant in the Naughties had multiplied Tribble-like into dozens, soon to be hundreds, with the Art Basel and Frieze franchises becoming the art-fair equivalents to Gagosian and White Cube. At the time of writing, some galleries were scoring up to 70% of their sales at fairs.
  
  Thompson is an economist, not an art insider. He looks at the business and economics of art without trying to parse the tangled language of aesthetics or meaning. Fortunately, he doesn't write like an economist; he still takes care to define the more abstruse language used by both his kind and the artsy set. His prose is generally clear and sometimes entertaining. He's arranged his chapters -- each of which reads like an essay you might find in the NYT Sunday Arts section -- in seven roughly thematic sections. There are a (very) few pictures in the middle to give you an idea of what this stuff looks like, though you'll be better served by Google.
  
  Not all is bright primary color. This book released in 2015; the intervening five years are like half a century in art-market years, so the lists of hot artists and galleries are mostly outdated by now. It's been a while since I read Shark, but I had an impression that this book isn't as well organized as the older one, and doesn't hold as strong a throughline. That could be because this is, as I mentioned, more an update than a new story. You really do need to read Shark to get the full backstory for the trends that Thompson continues to develop here. If this gets your motor going,
  The Orange Balloon Dog: Bubbles, Turmoil and Avarice in the Contemporary Art Market, the third book in the trilogy, brings the story up to ~2016, when things are no doubt more head-shakingly bizarre than an eon ago in 2012.
  
  I read Georgina Adam's
  Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses Of The Art Market In The 21st Century immediately before Supermodel (
  review here). They cover roughly the same time frame (Boom goes to ~2015) but have two different goals. Adam is a insider who considers the big-picture trends in the art market, while Thompson is more interested in the microeconomic workings of the industry. While they talk about some of the same themes, they complement rather than conflict with each other.
  
  The Supermodel and the Brillo Box is a continuation of the outsider analysis started in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, updating it by a few years and bringing us up on new wrinkles in the ever-metastisizing business of selling art. If you read Shark, some amount of this book is review and you may get only three stars' worth of value out of it. If you're new to the series, you'll be coming to this material fresh, and it should be a four-star experience for you. In either case, you'll be either appalled by or envious of the hijinks chronicled within.
• 
  Ilya Kavalerov

  A slightly disappointing sequel to "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark." Much of the message in that book is recapitulated in the first few chapters here, and the first third feels like an acceleration of $12 Million Stuffed Shark and thereby pretty good.
  
  Same concepts of dealer and artist brand being responsible for making social markets for the top 0.01%. Quotes like:
  
  “Artist careers progress through a process that the art world calls validation and the business world knows as brand equity.”, “The dollar value of the back story can be huge” and, in the context of art fair attendance: “Buying makes you feel connected to what is going on.”
  
  But all this good stuff is in the 1st third. There are also some entertaining anecdotes about the biggest artists, and collectors, of our day.
  
  But after the halfway point the whole book starts to drag. There are laundry lists of just about everything, prices, artworks, museums, curators, whatever. So its pretty boring. Overall, the book doesn't add much to its predecessor, other than the entertaining anecdotes, which are maybe a quarter of the book in page count.
• 
  Nofreeusernames Nofreeusernames

  Jak prodat voskovou figurínu své manželky?
  
  Don Thompson přichází po knize Jak prodat vycpaného žraloka za 12 milionů dolarů s dalším výletem do světa umění. Supermodelka a krabice Brillo mapuje dobu od roku 2008 a na rozdíl od předchozí knihy nabízí mnohem širší perspektivu, než je tečkovaný svět Damiena Hirsta. Čtěte celou recenzi:
  http://nlx.cz/jak-prodat-voskovou-fig...
• 
  Biblio Files (takingadayoff)

  Don Thompson is an economist, not an art critic. To be honest, I'm tired of the "let's look at every subject through the lens of economics" genre, so it's a good thing I didn't realize I was reading such a book until I was well into it and pretty much hooked.
  
  Thompson has a lot to say about the art market, but his main point is that a good backstory is vital to selling a work for the most money possible. Everyone loves a good story. It could be that the art was owned by a movie star or that the artist is a Chinese dissident, or that the art was forgotten and only rediscovered recently. How about this one -- remember a few years back when Las Vegas casino owner Steve Wynn was showing off his Picasso, Le Reve, and accidentally put his elbow through the canvas? He figured it lost a good chunk of its value, had it repaired so that the rip wasn't visible and was able to sell it for even more than before. Apparently the story of his errant elbow was good enough to ADD value to the painting.
  
  Thompson also tells some stories that will have your head spinning if, like me, you have a hard time defining what art is. Damien Hirst, who is possibly the wealthiest artist today, or perhaps ever, is famous for a series of paintings of dots. They are perfect dots, equidistant from each other and uniform in size. They are painted by one of the technicians who work in his factory. He signs the paintings and freely admits that someone else painted the dots. People pay millions of dollars for the paintings. Are they paying for his signature? For his concept, which to the uninitiated look like a wallpaper pattern? For the chance to sell the painting for even more millions in the near future? Who knows?
  
  My favorite story isn't even about an artist, it's about the collectors Herbert and Dorothy Vogel who spent decades collecting pieces from new artists. They bought what they liked. They were government workers living in a rent controlled apartment in Manhattan and they enjoyed visiting galleries and exhibits and meeting people who loved art. They amassed a collection worth millions, but never sold any of it. When it overran their small apartment, they donated it all to the National Gallery. Now that's a great story.
• 
  Yifat Shaik

  it's very similar to the earlier book- some new information but mostly a supplement (you will very likely have to read earlier books) but it is well written and well researched and worth reading if you are interested in the world of contemporary art
• 
  Theremin Poisoning

  The economics are somewhat interesting, but the "back stories" are LIFE.
• 
  Gabrielle Gonzales

  Interesting stuff. Anyway, can rich ppl stop
• 
  Sara

  Just bloody brilliant - well-researched, so convincingly argued, page-turning pacing
• 
  Bonnie Brody

  Don Thompson, author of The Supermodel and the Brillo Box, is an economist. He writes about contemporary art from an economist's vantage point which is a very interesting perspective. The reader is privy to the reasons behind the valuation of art and the trends in the art market. Mr. Thompson carefully analyzes several topics of interest including collecting and investing, contemporary artists, the role of auction houses, galleries, status, and the prices of art as they fluctuate in the market.
  
  The author is very clear that he is not an artist but is reporting on trends. He looks at issues such as the role that status plays in collecting, even analyzing the fact that where a particular piece of art is displayed informs one about the collector. More expensive pieces tend to be shown in high traffic areas of the home while art of lesser value is placed in rooms not often seen by the public.
  
  While I enjoyed this book, I was hoping for a more aesthetic approach to contemporary art which I did not find here. I did learn, however, about the role of uber-galleries and the more traditional galleries in relation to the artist. I also was fascinated by the way that different nations entered and participated in the art market.
  
  As a lover of art, I appreciated this book but my heart is not in the economics of art. It is the appreciation and love of creativity that moves me. I am touched by certain pieces and untouched by others. As the author states, "This book is about the themes that swirl around the top of the art market: about collectors, artists, auction houses and dealers, and prices." If these are things you seek to understand, this is the right book. I probably would have done better in the early eighteenth to early twentieth century where "most artists or art collectors would have said that art is about beauty."
• 
  Jenna

  Abandoned at page 142.
  
  This sequel to The $12 Million Stuffed Shark falls flat. It had its moments in the first half, but I was trudging through it more than I ever did with its predecessor, and ultimately I have admitted defeat.
  
  But there is one chapter that is totally worth reading and I found just as enjoyable and interesting as the entire first book: "The Art Market Crash of '08." The economic down turn happened almost right after the release of The $12 Million Stuffed Shark and it brought an opportunity to explore how such an event specifically effects the buying and selling of the art world. Which is great. And interesting and captivating and I literally perked up a bit when I got to this section.
  
  ("Authenticating Warhol" was another chapter that sticks out in my mind as new and different...)
  
  Overall though, I found this book to cover the same concepts I had read before just bolstered with different examples. All that stuff was enlightening and fascinating the first time around, but this sequel is more like a remixed repeat than an extension of a really interesting topic.
  
  Except for "The Art Market Crash of '08." Go read it. Third chapter.
• 
  Marc Delgado

  
  La supermodelo y la caja de Brillo, de
  Don Thompson no es tanto una crítica sino una fotografía panorámica del mercado del arte contemporáneo de hoy en día. Superada la barrera que el arte tiene que ser bello y placentero a los sentidos para convertirse en un medio de expresión, la diferencia de lo que vale una obra de arte de otra hoy en día es algo borroso que responde a diversas confluencias, entre ellas la frivolidad de los que compran arte por tenerlo.
  Aún así, este es un libro necesario para todo aquel estudiante de arte, economía, empresa o, simplemente para entender mejor el tipo de cliente que puede entrar en una galería de arte y cómo se vende este.
  Thompson también es un escritor sólido y la traducción está bien ceñida. También es un buen entretenimiento.
• 
  Don Thompson

  With the price of contemporary art sometimes beyond comprehension Don Thompson (not me) tries to explain why this is from the viewpoint of an economist. Why does Damien Hirsts work inspire such devotion? In essence he tries, somewhat successfully, to explain that this is like the futures market, art collectors are 'gambling' on success. But in the background is the shadier side, the sellers of this art are not necessarily arbiters of taste, they are profit seekers. The point he makes, and makes well, is that this is advertising on a huge scale. You are being sold a product. The style of the writing and the concept of art as economics works well, the downside is that after reading it you feel a bit grubby. Also one just has to remember Van Gogh sold one picture in his lifetime......
• 
  Arnied

  I love modern art. I love it a little less after reading this book. Seems dealers control this world and drive up prices for the big artists. In a great deal of cases they create the demand for those artists. However, there are some really fun stories about exhibitions I wish I had seen...especially some of the more stunt-like pieces. One artist actually copies all the pieces from a show across the street and that is his show. Good stuff. And there will always be artist like Banksy that can take on the world via the internet.. So I am still a fan...but the inside look was a little to business business business for me.
• 
  Writerlibrarian

  Less stellar than his first work on the subject. He traces the portrait of the contemporary art market after the 2008 crisis but not as well as he did in the previous book and covered the period before 2008.
  
  Quite a few things were repeated from the first book, remixed but at core same facts. It gives a feeling of déjè lu to the work. Still Thompson's style is clear, accessible and over all interesting.
  
  Less engrossing but still interesting.
• 
  Ninette Gyorody

  A great read about the secondary art market and how it operates unto itself. Accessible with anecdotes and jaw dropping stories of what happens with the billion dollar plus club. Helped me understand economic terms related to desire and need. I knew I would never get to own a Warhol, now I definitely know I won't! Chapters delve into art fairs, online art auctions, dealer behaviour, collector behaviour, the most sought after contemporary living artists and the auction houses.
• 
  Naomi

  Interesting topic but fairly dry writing. Michael Lewis this is not...
• 
  Theodore Kinni

  Fun and scary stories that will make you think twice before you buy modern art
• 
  Veronika Steff

  Pro mě už toho v ní moc nového nebylo, ale méně znalým by se mohla líbit.
  https://milyctenarskydenicku.blogspot...
• 
  Tamsen

  Thought this book was just super! Really informative and well-paced.
• 
  Denis5305

  Don Thompson popisuje prostredi vrcholku spolecenske/financni/umelecke pyramidy. Predstavuje jednotlive hrace a jejich menici se roli v oblasti prodeje umeni. Poutave naspana analyza tedy zahrnuje galerie, aukcni domy, obchodniky, umelce i zakazniky. Jako bonus ctenar obdrzi porci barvitych pribehu a historek. Autor na cele prostredi pohlizi s odstupem a obcasnym jen tezko skryvanym sarkasmem. Hlavni tezi cele knihy je to ze prodej je ovladan pribehem (skutecnym nebo vybajenym), financni spekulaci, ekonomickymi zajmy jednotlivych hracu a rivalitou mezi konkurenty. Don Thompson toho o prostredi soucasneho umeni vi hodne a nevaha se podelit.