Posts Tagged ‘auction-houses’
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of
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 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.
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art
Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné 1962-1987
In the forty years since he first appeared on the New York art scene, Andy Warhol has become synonymous with Pop Art–and with the wry definition of fame as something that never lasts more than 15 minutes. But Warhol spent his career working so prodigiously as to assure long lasting renown. In the printmaking field alone, his output was prolific, and his appropriation of silkscreen as a fine art medium forever altered the way prints look.
This thoroughly revised and expanded fourth edition of Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné: 1962-1987 traces Warhol’s complete graphic oeuvre from his first unique works on paper in 1962 through his final published portfolio in 1987. More than 1,700 works are illustrated, an increase of 500 from the previous edition of the catalogue raisonné, and complete documentation is provided for each. New additions include a section focusing on Warhol’s popular portraits, with documentation of prints that were related to paintings commissioned during the 1970s and 1980s and a new supplement featuring prints and illustrated books from the 1950s, including the beloved 25 Cats Named Sam and One Blue Pussy. There is also an eight-page essay by Donna De Salvo addressing Warhol’s self-published books and portfolios from the same era. An extensive chronology of printmaking activity, a complete exhibition history, a selected bibliography, and a greatly expanded appendix to published prints, complete the book. Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné: 1962-1987, in its fourth edition, will continue to be the critical reference tool for scholars, collectors, auction houses, libraries, curators, and art dealers.
Warhol had the tremendous gift of understanding which were the defining myths of a generation. . . . [His] political gift was his ability to make objective as art the defining images of the American consciousness–the images that expressed our desires, our fears, and what we. . .trusted and mistrusted. –Arthur C. Danto
Fourth Edition Revised and Expanded by Frayda Feldman and Claudia Defendi.
Edited by Frayda Feldman, Claudia Defendi and Jörg Schellmann.
Essays by Arthur C. Danto and Donna De Salvo.
Hardcover, 9.75 x 11.75 in.,400 pages, 1500 color, 200 b/w illustrations
