Sharks stuffed with money: the curious economics of contemporary art.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Culture and Reviews

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The poet Wallace Stevens, wealthy from his position as vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, once remarked that there was a huge difference between appreciating art and owning it. But Don Thompson, a business professor at Toronto's York University an d the author of the insightful and compulsively readable book The $12 Million Stuffed Shark (Palgrave Macmillan), argues that the two activities are increasingly indistinguishable. Thompson spent a year touring auction houses, talking with dealers, and even hanging out with artists, who emerge as altogether less interesting than the buyers and sellers around them.

Consider the case of the British advertising legend Charles Saatchi, one of the central figures in Thompson's study of "the curious economics of contemporary art." Married to the voluptuous TV cook Nigella Lawson, Saatchi is "the prototype of the modern branded collector," a tastemaker who doesn't just collect art but creates whole markets in the stuff, no matter how bizarre, sensationalistic, or banal it might seem at first (or second, or third) blush. He adds value simply by his association with an artist.

Back in 1991, Saatchi commissioned The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living--a 15-foot tiger shark suspended in a giant glass tank of formaldehyde--from Damien Hirst, whose reputation he had largely created via early patronage. Saatchi reportedly had fallen in love with Hirst's work after seeing A Thousand Years, an installation featuring a rotting cow's head, flies, and a bug zapper.

By 2005 the embalmed shark had turned green and lost a fin but still sold for $12 million, at the time the second-highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist. (A couple of years later, Hirst would move into first place, at last surpassing Jasper Johns.) The buyer was Steve Cohen, an investment whiz who earns $500 million a year and is, Thompson notes dryly, "considered a genius" in the world of high finance.

"Who pays $12 million for a decaying shark?" Thompson asks. The short answer is insecure rich people who want to "prove to the rest of the world that they really are rich." And that they are cosmopolitan with exquisitely rarefied taste. "A great many people can afford a small yacht," Thompson says. "But art distinguishes you."

The best thing about Thompson's book is that it demystifies the art world by walking through its arcane and often misleading financial...