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Art for Sale: A Candid View of the Art Market

Dirk Boll

Many recent publications are directed towards those interested in participating in the art market itself, or at least keen to learn its mysteries.   Dirk Boll is managing director of Christie's, Europe and his Art for Sale: A Candid View of the Art Market is clearly directed towards such audiences. Indeed, books on the art market are now a consistent thread in publishing and there have been a number of historical studies and commentaries appearing in recent months.  Such developments are a further demonstration of the appetite and interest in this subject matter in both academic circles and the wider public.

Boll’s text is informative and packed with descriptive summaries of the mechanisms and processes of the contemporary art market.  It is arranged as a series of short, themed sections providing explanations of key notions and recent developments, as well as outlines of auction and dealer practices, legal and economic frameworks, together with brief summaries of the historical background.  The writing is accessible, if a little journalistic, but there is a tendency to skate rapidly over some important issues and at times the book feels like a tick-box exercise, with potted definitions composed as extended bullet points, rather than a critically engaged narrative assessment.  

This is not to say that the book is not interesting or useful; far from it, but it may be important to acknowledge that Art for Sale is a book that describes rather than analyses the art market.  Boll is a trained lawyer as well as MD of Christie’s Zurich, so one doesn’t expect the critical analysis of, say, a cultural theorist or an historian.  Indeed, this brings into question the notion of a ‘candid view’ as the subtitle to the book suggests.  That said, there are subtle suggestions that Boll is aware that there is more to say – when he writes of the ‘idea’ of Theodore Adorno’s ‘ritual’ for instance – but there still remain some curious suggestions.  Highly complex notions, such as ‘authenticity’, for example, are dealt with in just 300 words, with the rather prosaic conclusion that for a ‘work of art to be authentic’, one must look towards a ‘committee of experts’.  Nonetheless, the book will be a very useful primer for those readers with little knowledge of the art market, but perhaps the book is not for specialists, who will not only already have knowledge of its insights, but may also find themselves questioning many of the observations presented?            

Art for Sale: A Candid View of the Art Market  by Dirk Boll is published by Hatje Cantz Verlag 2011. 198 pp., £13.99. ISBN 978-3-7757-3009-9