This highly readable and timely book explores the transformation of the modern and contemporary art market in the 21st century from a niche trade to a globalised operation worth an estimated $50 billion a year. Drawing on her personal experience, the author describes in fascinating detail the contributions made by a range of actors and institutions to these recent developments. The book focuses on the development of auction houses into globalised, often cutthroat 'art business' firms; the emergence and modi operandi of 'mega-dealers' and middlemen; the 'new frontier' of selling art on the internet; the radical changes in the profile of art collectors; the phenomenon of the 'branded' artist and the explosion of art fairs. It addresses the negative side to the art market's expansion, particularly its lack of transparency and light regulation. The author's engaging style makes this informative text ideal for collectors, students, and anyone interested in learning more about the evolution of the unprecedented market for art which exists today.

The work of art's mattering and materialization in a globalized world, with close readings of works by Takahashi Murakami, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Hirschhorn, and others. It may be time to forget the art world--or at least to recognize that a certain historical notion of the art world is in eclipse. Today, the art world spins on its axis so quickly that its maps can no longer be read; its borders blur. In Forgetting the Art World, Pamela Lee connects the current state of this world to globalization and its attendant controversies. Contemporary art has responded to globalization with images of movement and migration, borders and multitudes, but Lee looks beyond iconography to view globalization as a world process. Rather than think about the "global art world" as a socioeconomic phenomenon, or in terms of the imagery it stages and sponsors, Lee considers "the work of art's world" as a medium through which globalization takes place. She argues that the work of art is itself both object and agent of globalization. Lee explores the ways that art actualizes, iterates, or enables the processes of globalization, offering close readings of works by artists who have come to prominence in the last two decades. She examines the "just in time" managerial ethos of Takahashi Murakami; the production of ethereal spaces in Andreas Gursky's images of contemporary markets and manufacture; the logic of immanent cause dramatized in Thomas Hirschhorn's mixed-media displays; and the "pseudo-collectivism" in the contemporary practice of the Atlas Group, the Raqs Media Collective, and others. To speak of "the work of art's world," Lee says, is to point to both the work of art's mattering and its materialization, to understand the activity performed by the object as utterly continuous with the world it at once inhabits and creates.

In 2017, Leonardo da Vinci’s small oil painting the Salvator Mundi was sold at auction. In the words of its discoverer, the image of Christ as savior of the world is “the rarest thing on the planet.” Its $450 million sale price also makes it the world’s most expensive painting.
For two centuries, art dealers had searched in vain for the Holy Grail of art history: a portrait of Christ as the Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci. Many similar paintings of greatly varying quality had been executed by Leonardo’s assistants in the early sixteenth century. But where was the original by the master himself? In November 2017, Christie’s auction house announced they had it. But did they?
The Last Leonardo tells a thrilling tale of a spellbinding icon invested with the power to make or break the reputations of scholars, billionaires, kings, and sheikhs. Ben Lewis takes us to Leonardo’s studio in Renaissance Italy; to the court of Charles I and the English Civil War; to Amsterdam, Moscow, and New Orleans; to the galleries, salerooms, and restorer’s workshop as the painting slowly, painstakingly emerged from obscurity. The vicissitudes of the highly secretive art market are charted across six centuries. It is a twisting tale of geniuses and oligarchs, double-crossings and disappearances, in which we’re never quite certain what to believe. Above all, it is an adventure story about the search for lost treasure, and a quest for the truth.

New expanded 248pp 2019 Edition. The single best collection of photography of Banksy’s street work that has ever been assembled for print. If that isn’t enough there are some words too. You Are An Acceptable Level of Threat covers his entire street art career, spanning the late '90s right up to the ‘Seasons Greetings’ Christmas 2018 piece in Port Talbot, Wales. This new edition includes his self-destructing ‘Love is in the Bin’ intervention, which according to Sotheby's is "the first artwork in history to have been created live during an auction." The groundbreaking ‘Dismaland’ show, his Paris ’68 revisited works, The Walled Off Hotel, Brexit, Cans Festival, Brookyln and Basquiat, as well as new works from Gaza and New York. Also featuring the controversial ‘Cheltenham Spies’ as well as ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, ‘Art Buff’ and the spectacular ‘Mobile Lovers’ which appeared outside Bristol Boys Boxing Club. 248 pages featuring his greatest works of art in context.

In the late 19th century, a centuries-old preference for highly ornamented architecture gave way to a budding Modernism of clean lines and unadorned surfaces. At the same moment, everyday objects—cups, saucers, chairs, and tables—began to receive critical attention.
Alina Payne addresses this shift, arguing for a new understanding of the genealogy of architectural modernism: rather than the well-known story in which an absorption of technology and mass production created a radical aesthetic that broke decisively with the past, Payne argues for a more gradual shift, as the eloquence of architectural ornamentation was taken on by objects of daily use. As she demonstrates, the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier should be seen as the culmination of a conversation about ornament dating as far back as the Renaissance. Payne looks beyond the usual suspects of philosophy and science to establish theoretical catalysts for the shift from ornament to object in the varied fields of anthropology and ethnology; art history and the museum; and archaeology and psychology.

An inventive examination of a crucial but neglected aspect of architecture, by an architect writing to architects. Maintenance plays a crucial role in the production and endurance of architecture, yet architects for the most part treat maintenance with indifference. The discipline of architecture values the image of the new over the lived-in, the photogenic empty and stark building over a messy and labored one. But the fact is: homes need to be cleaned and buildings and cities need to be maintained, and architecture no matter its form cannot escape from such realities. In Maintenance Architecture, Hilary Sample offers an inventive examination of the architectural significance of maintenance through a series of short texts and images about specific buildings, materials, and projects. Although architects have seldom choose to represent maintenance--imagining their work only from conception to realization--artists have long explored subjects of endurance and permanence in iconic architecture. Sample explores a range of art projects--by artists including Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeff Wall, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles--to recast the problem of maintenance for architecture. How might architectural design and discourse change as a building cycle expands to include "post-occupancy"? Sample looks particularly at the private home, exhibition pavilion, and high-rise urban building, giving special attention to buildings constructed with novel and developing materials, technologies, and precise detailing in relation to endurance. These include Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House (1929), the Lever House (1952), the U.S. Steel Building (1971), and the O-14 (2010). She considers the iconography of skyscrapers; maintenance workforces, both public and private; labor-saving technology and devices; and contemporary architectural projects and preservation techniques that encompass the afterlife of buildings. A selection of artworks make the usually invisible aspects of maintenance visible, from Martha Rosler's Cleaning the Drapes to Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's The Kiss.

The first book in two decades to consider the entire oeuvre of Mark Dion (b. 1961), this volume examines thirty years of the American artist’s pioneering inquiries into how we collect, interpret, and display nature. Part of a generation of artists expanding institutional critique in the 1990s, Dion adopted the methods of the archaeologist or the natural history museum, juxtaposing natural objects, taxidermy, books, and more to reorganize the natural and the manmade in poetic, witty ways. These sculptures, installations, and interventions offer novel approaches to questioning institutional power, which he sees as connected to the control and representation of nature.
Generously illustrated, this publication introduces new insights and features more than seventy-five artworks. Essays address topics ranging from Dion’s ecological activism to his loving critique of museums. A diverse group of contributors explores his work as a teacher, his public artworks such as Neukom Vivarium in Seattle, and his intricate curiosity cabinets installed throughout the world. They reveal how Dion’s practice and formal investigations—which are rooted in history—connect to contemporary questions of disciplinary boundaries and the acquisition of knowledge in the age of the Anthropocene.

More often than not, a work of art is produced through a dialectic of action and reflection--a zooming into and out of the material at hand (be it physical or conceptual) that eventually arrives at a synthesis of the two drives. See It Again, Say It Again explores this process of reflection and research within the making of an art work. Does it lead to better art? What do artists actually do when they engage in research? The book includes essays by artists and theorists Janneke Wesseling, Jeroen Boomgaard, Jeremiah Day, Stephan Dillemuth, Irene Fortuyn, Gijs Frieling, Henri Jacobs, W.J.M. Kok, Aglaia Konrad, Frank Mandersloot, Aernout Mik, Ruchama Noorda, Vanessa Ohlraun, Graeme Sullivan, Moniek Toebosch, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Hilde Van Gelder, Philippe Van Snick, Barbara Visser, Kitty Zijlmans and Italo Zuffi.

Known for her layered, meticulously constructed works that trace and perform the undercurrents of systems of value, image-making and methods of observation, Amie Siegel’s work moves between film, video, photography, performance and installation. Published on the occasion of the first large-scale exhibition of the American artist at Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, “Double Negative” is part of the museum’s RICOCHET series, which establishes a dialogue between the works of contemporary artists and the historical spaces of the Villa Stuck, and gives insight into the last decade of Siegel’s practice. The publication, as the exhibition, establishes correspondences between seven of the artist’s works since 2005 and including a newly commissioned film installation that gives the exhibition its title.

Catalogue suggests an artist’s exhibition catalogue, but is rather a chronological compilation of auction catalogues presenting the sales of the mid-century furniture designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret for Chandigarh, India, featured in Amie Siegel’s multi-element film installation Provenance (2013). An aside, an addendum, an index, the publication ends with the Christie's London catalogue page from the 2013 auction of Provenance itself in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Sale, which completes the economic circuit of the project.

Within forty-eight hours in the fall of 2014, buyers in the Sotheby’s and Christie’s New York auction houses spent $1.7 billion on contemporary art. Non-taxed freeport warehouses around the globe are stacked with art held for speculation. One of Jeff Koons’ five chromium-plated stainless steel balloon dogs sold for 50 percent more at auction than the previous record for any living artist. A painting by Christopher Wool, featuring four lines from a Francis Ford Coppola movie stenciled in black-on-a-white background, sold for $28 million. In The Orange Balloon Dog, economist and bestselling author Don Thompson cites these and other fascinating examples to explore the sometimes baffling activities of the high-end contemporary art market. He examines what is at play in the exchange of vast amounts of money and what nudges buyers, even on the subconscious level, to imbue a creation with such high commercial value.
Thompson analyzes the behaviors of buyers and sellers and delves into the competitions that define and alter the value of art in today’s international market, from New York to London, Singapore to Beijing. Take heed if your millions are tied up in stainless steel balloon dogs―Thompson also warns of a looming bust of the contemporary art price balloon.

The first comprehensive monograph devoted to Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her groundbreaking participatory art practice. The work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles brilliantly bridges feminism, environmentalism, and participatory art practice. Whether it’s her groundbreaking Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, which decries the separation, especially for women, between art on the one hand and caring for family, city, and planet on the other; or The Social Mirror, in which she covered a New York City Department of Sanitation truck entirely in mirrored glass―Ukeles's fascinating body of work includes public art installations, exhibitions, and performances around the world, frequently created in collaboration with sanitation and municipal workers, museum visitors, and the public. This first comprehensive book on the influential artist explores her legendary tenure as artist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation, which has paved the way for similar “embedded artists” in government and community organizations. Essays, interviews, and striking illustrations offer important perspectives on an artist who has transformed our ideas about the feminist, urban, ecological, and resilient aspects of artistic experience.

In the face of unparalleled growth and a truly global audience, the popularity of contemporary art has clearly become a double-edged affair. Today, an unprecedented number of museums, galleries, biennial-style exhibitions, and art fairs display new work in all its variety, while art schools continue to inject fresh talent onto the scene at an accelerated rate. In the process, however, contemporary art has become deeply embedded not only in an expanding art industry, but also the larger cultures of fashion and entertainment.
Buskirk argues that understanding the dynamics of art itself cannot be separated from the business of presenting art to the public. As strategies of institutional critique have given way to various forms of collaboration or accommodation, both art and museum conventions have been profoundly altered by their ongoing relationship. The escalating market for contemporary art is another driving force. Even as art remains an idealized activity, it is also understood as a profession, and in increasingly obvious ways a business, particularly as practiced by star artists who preside over branded art product lines.

In capitalist society labour not only produces commodities (i.e. goods which can be freely sold on the market), but also produces ‘itself and the worker as a commodity’, the worker becomes an even cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates’. The worker not only loses the product of his labour and create alien objects for alien people; he is not only ‘depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine’ through the increasing division and mechanization of labour, so that ‘from being a man [he] becomes an abstract activity and a belly’ (p. 68) --but he even has to ‘sell himself and his human identity’ (p. 70), i.e. he must himself become a commodity in order to exist as a physical subject. So instead of being an expression of the whole man, labour is his alienation; instead of being the full and free realization of man it has become a ‘loss of realization’. ‘So much does labour’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death’ (p. 108).