Boom

If dealers built the market's foundation, the auction houses gave it its theater. Christie's and Sotheby's, Shnayerson shows, discovered that contemporary art could generate the kind of spectacle that Old Masters no longer did. A single evening sale, with its hushed room, its telephone bidders, and its auctioneer coaxing the numbers upward, became a public performance of value. The hammer price was a fact the whole world could read the next morning, and that fact then reset what every comparable work was worth.

The mechanics are more managed than the drama suggests. Shnayerson explains the guarantee — the practice by which an auction house, or a third party, promises a seller a minimum price before the sale even happens. Guarantees remove risk for the consignor and let houses compete for the best material, but they also mean the market is partly underwritten rather than freely discovered. A work that appears to have soared past its estimate may have had its floor quietly arranged in advance. The transparency is a performance layered over a private negotiation.

By the 2000s the market had outgrown the gallery and the saleroom, and Shnayerson follows it into the new infrastructure of the boom. Art fairs — Art Basel and its Miami Beach offshoot above all — turned buying into a global social season. Collectors flew in on private jets, dealers hung their best inventory in convention-center booths, and enormous sums changed hands in the first hours before the public was even admitted. The fair compressed a year of business into a weekend and made attendance itself a marker of status.

Then there was the flip. Shnayerson devotes close attention to the practice of buying an emerging artist's work cheaply and reselling it within months or a year for a large multiple. Speculators began treating young painters as commodities futures, bidding up so-called 'zombie formalism' and other easily traded abstraction, then dumping the work when the momentum faded — often leaving the artist's reputation wrecked in the process. Dealers fought to control who bought, precisely to keep speculators from turning their artists into churned inventory.

Step back from the dealers and the record hammer prices, and the deeper story Shnayerson tells is a conversion. Over half a century, a painting stopped being primarily something to look at and became primarily something to own — an asset class alongside real estate and equities, valued by the same logic and traded by many of the same people. Boom is, at bottom, the chronicle of that reclassification, and of what gets lost when it happens.

The pressure on artists is where the cost shows most clearly. When a young painter's canvases start flipping at auction for sums that dwarf the gallery price, the market begins to want more of exactly that thing, and it wants it fast. Shnayerson describes artists who become, in effect, brands obliged to supply a product, their studios turned into workshops of assistants producing recognizable inventory. Some thrive on it; others find that the very success that enriches their collectors quietly narrows what they are allowed to make. The market rewards a signature and punishes a change of direction.

The Bacon triptych that broke the record in 2013 was itself soon overtaken — by a Modigliani, then a da Vinci, then others, each hammer price a fresh headline. Shnayerson's book is a portrait of the world that produces those headlines, assembled from years of conversations with the dealers, collectors, auctioneers and artists who live inside it. What he documents is not a scandal but a transformation, carried out mostly in the open by people who mostly believed in what they were building.