Art as a one-stop shop
What is, or was, the art world? In A Year in the Art World, the curator and historian Matthew Israel promises an insider account of the studios, art schools, museums, fairs and biennials, as well as the armies of curators, critics, collectors, estate managers and “advisors” who keep the show on the road. At the same time, he hopes to persuade the reader “that the art world has much more to offer than eccentric celebrities, pretentious ideas and stories of record-breaking auction prices”. The art world, he writes – citing a study of major US museum collections in which more than 85 per cent of artists were white and male – “inevitably reflects inequalities”. But Israel admits that his portrait is of power as he finds it, not a corrective. His interview subjects are nearly always drawn from the artworld’s professional elite: here he is conversing with Adam Sheffer, the vice-president of the mega-gallery Pace; Klaus Biesenbach, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; or Ralph Rugoff, the artistic director of the Venice Biennale.