SEVEN DAYS IN THE ART WORLD

Tavia Gilbert is upbeat and crisp as she narrates Thornton's ethnographic investigation of the modern art world. Thornton spends a day in each of seven different art environments: Christie's auction house, an all-day MFA art critique class, the Basel Art Fair, the site of the Turner Prize in London, ARTFORUM magazine, Takashi Murakami's art studio, and the Venice Biennale. It all involves dizzying amounts of money, self-conscious artists, pseudo-intellectual jargon, and provocative sculptures built by an army of workers. Gilbert keeps the listener's attention as she adeptly delivers the sly humor and sense of wonder. It's also an artistic trip around the world. Gilbert takes the smart route by only occasionally adopting an accent, but her choice does mean some loss of the international flavor, and one may forget that one is in Switzerland or Japan or Britain. A.B. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine [Published: FEBRUARY 2015]