Seven Days in the Art World

By Sarah Thornton

Granta, October 2008, £15.99

Seven Days in the Art World is a slightly misleading title. The book doesn’t cover a continuous week, but takes place over seven disparate days, during which Sarah Thornton attends seven very different contemporary art events. It’s a testament to Thornton’s skill as a narrator that she’s able to combine these distinct facets into a coherent account that’s informative and entertaining, and that never feels weighted down by her five years of research.
Opening with a vignette of a Christie’s auction in New York in 2004, and ending with a chapter on last year’s Venice Biennale, this is a portrait of the art world during the peak of its boom years, marked by crazily escalating prices and levels of hype. Thornton visits the annual Basel art fair, the Turner Prize awards ceremony in London, and the Tokyo studios of superstar-artist Takashi Murakami. She also, as an alternative to such glittering occasions, attends a student seminar at a Los Angeles art school and drops by the New York offices of Artforum magazine.
Thornton has a doctorate in sociology and the most engaging parts of the book are when she’s describing human relationships and social hierarchies: Murakami lording it in first class during a plane journey while fawning museum curators sit back in economy; Read more