A few years ago, Sarah Thornton pitched a story on the relationship between dealers and collectors to Tate, the largest art magazine in Europe. She wound up conducting 30 in-depth interviews for, as she characterized it, “a piddly 1,000-word article,” then jumped right back in and did another 28 interviews for a similarly short piece on artists and dealers. All of the interviews were conducted off the record, the articles populated by anonymous characters. Then, one day, gallery owner Jeff Poe told her: “Those articles are fun, but nobody’s going to read your stuff unless you tell stories and name names.” And that, she told us over tea at a café in midtown Manhattan recently, was the genesis of Seven Days in the Art World.
Thornton soon began researching and writing what she intended to be the first chapter, an eyewitness account of the opening of a Dave Muller exhibition at a gallery in London’s East End. She wound up scrapping the material. “I worked out a lot of the problems for the book in that chapter,” she reflected, “but after I wrote some of the others, I felt it wasn’t as strong. It had to go.”
After completing chapters set at a Christie’s auction in New York, a CalArts “crit” session, and the awarding of the Turner Prize in London, Thornton was already well into the research for a chapter about Artforum The magazine’s publisher, Charles Guarino, read the completed sections, liked what he saw, and mentioned her name to literary agent David Kuhn, which eventually led to Kuhn sending a proposal around New York. The book landed at Norton, where, Thornton enthused, “I love my editor, Tom Mayer. He’s 26 years old, but he’s so mature and thoughtful.”
“The art world is actually very sprawling and diverse,” Thornton said of the book’s seven globe-spanning chapters. “It’s incredibly factionalized and polarized… Most of the people at an auction have never been to a crit; most of the people at a crit have never been to an auction.” The opening chapters set in those environments, she explained, were like the extremes of a pendulum’s arc, with subsequent chapters representing points somewhat closer together until the pendulum comes to rest at the Venice Biennale at the end.
Thornton had never trained as a journalist; she came to freelance writing after obtaining a PhD and running a media studies program at a British university. “One of the reasons I left academis was that I love writing too much,” she told us. “Academic writing is so difficult and obscurantist, and full of defensive theoretical obstacles… well, maybe bad academic writing. I just wanted to write clearly as I could and give the reader a strong sense of being there.” She described her approach as being more ethnographic than journalistic. “The only way I knew how to research was as an ethnographer… It was a word that was important to my sense of self as a writer,” she explained. “Ethnography is usually way more in-depth and immersive, and you have a different attitude towards the subject. It’s a culture where empathy is supposed to be a primary mode… You do go native somewhat.” To illustrate that last assertion, she told us about an earlier project, where she spent a year working at an ad agency, hoping to write a book about the experience; in the end, she confessed, she only produced an article.
Thornton spent five years researching Seven Days in the Art World, and became familiar to many of her interview subjects, some of them running into her at events on different continents—”although until the book had a material existence, people don’t really think you’re doing it,” she confided. “I’m sure a lot of people thought it would never see the light of day.” Now that it has, the economic upheaveals of recent years have created something of a time capsule effect, capturing a certain moment of early 21st-century exuberance. Not that Thornton resists the changes: “It became almost boring watching the prices for art go up, up, up,” she admitted. “It’s interesting to see them start to go down again.” As for what comes next, “I need to go home,” she told us, “and mull that over a bit.”