Product Description
Fascinating and highly subjective, built on Philip Hook's thirty-five years' experience of the art market, Breakfast at Sotheby's explores the artist and his hinterland (including -isms, middle-brow artists, Gericault and suicides), subject and style (from abstract art and banality through surrealism and war), 'wall-power', provenance and market weather. Comic, revealing, piquant, splendid and absurd, Breakfast at Sotheby's is a book of pleasure and intelligent observation.
Book of the Year Sunday Times, Guardian, Spectator, Financial Times and Mail on Sunday 'It's hard to write an amusing book about art that has some serious things to say, but Hook has done it.' Frank Whitford, Sunday Times, Books of the Year 'How to nail the mad, bad, crazy contemporary art world in print? Sotheby's senior director Hook unravels, with humour, piquancy and erudition, what drives the economics of taste.' Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times, Books of the Year 'Delightful.' Economist 'Everything you might need to know about the art world, from forgeries and restoration to theft . . . Paintings with even a dash of red in them will be more valuable than those without; everyone wants a blue Chagall; a smile is better than a scowl . . . often very funny.' Tom Fleming, Literary Review 'Like participating in a hugely enjoyable personal tutorial given by a cultured, witty, clear-eyed, worldly teacher with a fully functioning sense of humour.' William Boyd, Spectator 'I absolutely adored it. Very funny and often touching, it teems with vivid observation and anecdotes.' Jilly Cooper, Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year 'An ideal volume for the art lover's bedside.' Martin Gayford, Spectator, Books of the Year
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