Hardcover. NY, Palgrave Macmillan , 6thpr., 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 268 pages, color illustrations. Why would a smart New York investment banker pay $12 million for the decaying, stuffed carcass of a shark? By what alchemy does Jackson Pollock's drip painting No. 5, 1948 sell for $140 million? Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored.
Hardcover. London, Sotheby's, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, glossy boards, 84 pages. The catalogue for an auction of a group of the original drawings Blake did to illustrate Blair's poem "The Grave," in 1805. These drawings had been lost, were recently re-discovered and were auctioned by Sothebys. The catalogue is of 20 lots, and theis essay by Bialler surveys the history and scholarship surrounding the works.
