Author attempts to define art

“Why do people think artists are special? It’s just another job,” said pop art pioneer Andy Warhol. Yet with a surge of interest in contemporary art, and in those whose “job” it is to create it, the question “What is art?” is a loaded one, fraught with nuance, opinion, financial motivations and overt politics.

In approaching the debate, writer Sarah Thornton stumbles upon other questions: What is an artist? A curator? A collector? A critic? How do these roles, and the venerable institutions — the museums, auction houses, festivals, publications and schools — in which they reside, impact each other?

“Seven Days in the Art World” is not just a well-researched ethnographical slice of life, nor a tumbling answer to an unsolvable chicken-and-egg riddle, but an earnest, thought-provoking reflection on what the world of art is in modern society. Thornton’s experience of a California Institute of the Arts seminar highlights an exhausting, inspiring struggle of students and their professors to create effective meaning in their work, while her sit-ins at an intensely competitive Christie’s auction provide a seemingly contradictory, commercialized reveal of what could potentially become of those students’ art.

Yet via these experiences, as well as her encounters with hugely successful Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, Thornton’s behind-the-scenes view of the world’s foremost art publication and trips to a renowned art festival, she finds that contemporary art involves complicated, strange and, for the reader, informative relationships between those who create it, buy it, discuss it and desire it.

The book brings up more questions than it answers, asking the reader to decide for herself the significance of each of these intricate relationships between art and commerce. Perhaps, it is true that both are simply born out of the same, quite-human need: to